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 as you might say. They'd both sacrifice everything for the sake of stirring up some trouble or calamity that would interest them. They live. . . vicariously."

Olivia would have interrupted him, defending Sabine and telling of the one real thing that had happened to her. . . the tragic love for her husband; she would have told him of all the abrupt, incoherent confidences Sabine had made her; but the old man gave her no chance. It seemed suddenly that he had become possessed, fiercely intent upon pouring out to her all the dark things he had kept hidden for so long.

(She kept thinking, "Why must I know all these things? Why must I take up the burden? Why was it that I should find those letters which had lain safe and hidden for so long?")

He was talking again quietly, the bony fingers weaving in and out their nervous futile pattern. "You see, Olivia. . . . You see, she takes drugs now . . . and there's no use in trying to cure her. She's old now, and it doesn't really matter. It's not as if she were young with all her life before her."

Almost without thinking, Olivia answered, "I know that."

He looked up quickly. "Know it?" he asked sharply. "How could you know it?"

"Sabine told me."

The head bowed again. "Oh, Sabine! Of course! She's dangerous. She knows far too much of the world. She's known too many strange people." And then he repeated again what he had said months ago after the ball. "She ought never to have come back here."

Into the midst of the strange, disjointed conversation there came presently the sound of music drifting toward them from the distant drawing-room. John Pentland, who was a little deaf, did not hear it at first, but after a little time he sat up, listening, and turning toward her, asked, "Is that Sybil's young man?"