Chapter 66

After that, they had left Teresa in peace. She was at liberty to recover from the flutter into which they had thrown her. She could look round once more at the vast drawing-room, and, unobserved, could take in the details of the panelling with the frieze of mermaids and dolphins, tails coiled into tails, scales overlapping onto scales in Elizabethan extravagance; she could look at the portraits while the click-clack of the conversation crackled in the background of her consciousness; she could leap across the centu…