Her bedroom still held the aroma of lilac, but flowers on her dressing table sat poised on the edge of dropping petals lost in the shadows of the pathos of beauty. She pulled back her hair in the mirror every morning stiff and unbending, each strand as unyielding as though she might iron out wrinkles from her sin. The mirror lied. Her own face, opposite to her in the glass, was too real, too wracked. She shut her own eyes as though they were other people's into whose arms at some time unanalyzable in her she might sink. She had heard things. Gossip up and down the back stairs. Whisper down the stairs the gentle voice of Clara. Slow, deep, deliberate, in the breakfast room—slow, deliberate, as though overheard where no one had been there. And in the morning, Samuel slammed the study door, growling father and son down the hall. Rocking back and forth against the banister, hand on the rail, ear cocked to hear what they would be saying, stood Eleanor. And then she heard it. A husky w
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