The cemetery seemed quite deserted. Gashes of overcharged daylight pressed in through the cypresses on to the graves: a hard light bestowing no grace and exacting each detail. In the shade of the pillared vaults round the walls what already seemed the dusk of the evening had begun to thicken, but the rank and file of small crosses staggered arms wide in the arraignment of sunshine. In spite of the brooding repose of the trees a hundred little shrill draughts came between them, and spurting across the graves made the decorations beloved of Cordelia creak and glitter. A wreath of black tin pansies swung from the arm of a cross with a clatter of petals, trailing colourless ribbons; a beaded garland had slipped down slantwise across the foot of a grave. Candles for the peculiar glory of the lately dead had been stuck in the unhealed earth: here and there a flame in a glass shade writhed, opaque in the sunshine. Above all this uneasy rustle of remembrance, white angels poised forward to admonish. The superlatives crowding each epitaph hissed out their ‘issimi’ and ‘issime’ from under the millinery of death. Everywhere, in ribbons, marbles, porcelains was a suggestion of the salon, and nowhere could the significance of death have been brought forward more startlingly.

‘I must say,’ remarked Cordelia, ‘I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.’

‘They would certainly be more difficult than others to get clear of,’ said Sydney; and quickly, in unthinking perturbation, she pushed open the cemetery gates, as though she were on a message to a friend’s house, and hurried in. Once among the graves she stood with Cordelia behind her, looking round again. She was oppressed by the thought, less of death than of the treachery of a future that must give one to this ultimately. She was not accustomed to consider death as other than as a spontaneous fine gesture. Now it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one, the last and most humiliating of those deprivations she had begun to experience. She thought, ‘It is all very well to escape to the future and think it will always be that; but this is the end of the future.’ Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky, she realized that living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and more of herself. The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next, and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have to turn back to it.