"That's different. I've been away ten years. Dad never had such a long
spell; and it was more than thirty years ago."

She was the first person to whom he opened his lips after receiving the
news of his father's death.

"It has killed him!" he said.

He had walked straight out of town with the news, straight out before
him in the noonday sun on the white road, and his feet had brought
him face to face with her in the hall of the ruined palazzo, a room
magnificent and naked, with here and there a long strip of damask, black
with damp and age, hanging down on a bare panel of the wall. It was
furnished with exactly one gilt armchair, with a broken back, and an
octagon columnar stand bearing a heavy marble vase ornamented with
sculptured masks and garlands of flowers, and cracked from top to
bottom. Charles Gould was dusty with the white dust of the road lying
on his boots, on his shoulders, on his cap with two peaks. Water dripped
from under it all over his face, and he grasped a thick oaken cudgel in
his bare right hand.

She went very pale under the roses of her big straw hat, gloved,
swinging a clear sunshade, caught just as she was going out to meet him
at the bottom of the hill, where three poplars stand near the wall of a
vineyard.

"It has killed him!" he repeated. "He ought to have had many years yet.
We are a long-lived family."