facing Kate Vollar. There was only a faint trace of surprise on her
apathetic--Jeremy Ammidon called it moonlike--countenance; as if her
overwhelming mischance had robbed her features of all further expressions
of interest or concern.

"I heard," Jeremy said in a voice pitched loud enough to conceal any
inward uncertainty, "that your father had been sick. Met Captain Rendell
on Essex Street and he said Barzil had lung fever. Thought I'd see if
there was any truth in it."

"He just managed to stay alive," Kate Vollar replied, gazing at him with
her stilled gray eyes. "But he's better now, though he's not up and about
yet. Shall I tell him that--that you are here?"

"Yes. Just say Jeremy Ammidon's below, and would like to pass a greeting
with him."

He followed the woman in, and entered a large gloomy chamber while she
mounted the stair leading directly from the front. The blackened
fireplace gaping uncovered for the summer, the woodwork, painted yellow
with an artificial graining, and a stiff set of ebonized chairs, their
dingy crimson plush backs protected by elaborate thread antimacassars,
seemed to hold and reflect the misfortunes of their owner. Jeremy picked
up an ostrich egg, painted with a clump of viciously green coconut palms
and a cottony surf; he put it down with an absent smile and impatiently
fingered a volume of "The Life of Harriet Atwood Newell." She was one of
the missionaries who had gone out on the _Caravan_, with Augustine Heard,
to India, but forbidden to land there had died not long after on the Ile
de France.