Five Nights: A Novel

E-text prepared by Rose Koven, Juliet Sutherland, Cathy Smith, and Project

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FIVE NIGHTS

A Novel

By

Victoria Cross

1908

By Victoria Cross

Five Nights
Life's Shop Window
Anna Lombard
Six Women
Six Chapters of a Man's Life
The Woman Who Didn't
To-morrow?
Paula
A Girl of the Klondike
The Religion of Evelyn Hastings
Life of my Heart

CONTENTS

PART I

The Gold Night

I THE TAKU INLET II THE TEA-SHOP III IN THE WOOD

PART II

The Violet Night

IV AT THE STUDIO V THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

PART III

The Black Night

VI IN MAYFAIR VII FREEDOM

PART IV

The Crimson Night

VIII LOSS IX IN 'FRISCO X IN THE SHADOW OF THE VOLCANO XI THE WAY OF THE GODS

PART V

The White Night

XII THE FLAMES OF LIFE'S FURNACE

FIVE NIGHTS

"The nights have different colours. Some nights are black, the nights of storm: some are electric blue, some are silver, the moon-filled nights: some are red under the hot planet Mars or the fierce harvest moon. Some are white, the white nights of the Arctic winter: but this was a violet night, a hot, mysterious, violet night of Midsummer."

LIFE'S SHOP WINDOW.

INTRODUCTION

As one looks over any period of one's life, it appears behind one as a shining maze of brilliant colour with spots in it here and there of brighter or darker hue. Each spot represents a period of time when our happiness has glowed brighter or waned; sometimes it is a day, more often it is a night. Looking back now, over a stretch of my existence I see many such spots gleaming brightly; they are nights of colour. The history of many of these is too sacred to be written, but there are Five Nights, which, though not the dearest to my memory, have yet stamped themselves and their colour on it for ever. And the record of these five nights is contained in the following pages.

TREVOR LONSDALE.

PART ONE

THE GOLD NIGHT

CHAPTER I

THE TAKU INLET

It was just striking three as I came up the companion-stairs on to the deck of the Cottage City, into the clear topaz light of a June morning in Alaska: light that had not failed through all the night, for in this far northern latitude the sun only just dips beneath the horizon at midnight for an hour, leaving all the earth and sky still bathed in limpid yellow light, gently paling at that mystic time and glowing to its full glory again as the sun rises above the rim.

Our steamer had left the open sea and entered the Taku Inlet, and we were steaming very slowly up it, surrounded on every side by great glittering blocks of ice, flashing in the sunshine as they floated by on the buoyant blue water. How blue it was, the colouring of sea and sky! Both were so vividly blue, the note of each so deep, so intense, one seemed almost intoxicated with colour. I stepped to the vessel's side, then made my way forward and stood there; I, the lover of the East, dazzled by the beauty of the North! The marvellous picture before me was painted in but three colours, blue, gold, and white.

The sides of the inlet were jagged lines of white, the sparkling crystalline whiteness of eternal snow on sharp-pointed, almost lance-like mountain peaks; the water a broad band of blue, the sky above a canopy of blue, and there at the end of the inlet, closing it, like some colossal monster crouched awaiting us, lay the Muir, the huge glacier, a solid wedge of ice, white also, but a transparent white full of blue shadows.

Who shall describe the wonderful air and atmosphere of the North? Its brilliancy, its delicacy, its radiant diamond-like clearness? And the silence, the enchanted stillness of the North? Now as we crept slowly onwards over the vivid water between the flashing icebergs, there was no sound. Complete silence round us, on earth and sea and in the blue vault above, impressive, glittering silence. None of the passengers had broken their sleep to come up to the glory above them, and I stood alone at the forward part of the vessel gliding on through this dream of lustrous blue. Slowly we advanced towards the Muir; very slowly, for these shining bergs carried death with them if they should graze hard against the steamer's side, and, cautiously, steered with infinite pains, the little boat crept on, zigzagging between them. A frail little toy of man, it seemed, to venture here alone; small, black, impertinent atom forcing its way so hardily into this magnificence of colour, this silent splendour, this radiant stillness of the North. Into this very fastness of the most gigantic forces of Nature it had penetrated, and the sapphire sea supported it, the transparent light illumined it, the lance-like mountains looked down upon it, and the glistening bergs forbore to crush it, as if disdaining to harm so fragile a thing.

Very slowly we pushed up the inlet, approaching the shimmering blue-green wall of ice that barred the upper end; seven hundred feet down below the clear surface of the water descends this wall, while three hundred feet of it rise above, forming a glorious shining palisade across the entire width of the inlet. As the sun played on the glittering façade, rays struck out from it as from a reflector, of every shade of green and blue, the deepest hue of emerald mingling with the lightest sapphire, iridescent, sparkling, wonderful. As we crept still nearer, over the living blue of the water, the continual fall of the icebergs from the front wall of the glacier became apparent. At intervals of about five minutes, with a terrific crash like thunder a great wedge of the glittering wall would fall forward into the blue-green depths, and a cloud of snowy spray rise up hundreds of feet into the air. The berg, thus detached, after a few minutes would rise to the surface, glistening, dazzling, and begin its joyous, buoyant voyage downwards to the sea. In all this brilliant setting, with this glory of light around and the triumphal crash of sound like the salute of cannon, amid this joyous movement and in this blaze of colour, amid all that seemed to personify life, we were watching the death of the glacier.

The colossal Muir Glacier, the remains of a world the history of which is lost in the dim twilight none can now penetrate, is dying slowly through a million years. From the mountains, eternally snow-covered, where its huge body, three hundred and fifty miles in extent, has rested through the centuries, it creeps forward slowly towards the sea to meet its doom. Formerly its lip touched the open ocean where now the Taku inlet commences to run inland. But the icy waters, that yet are so much warmer than itself, caressed it with eroding caresses and melted it, and broke bergs from it and rushed inwards, following it till they formed the Taku Inlet, and now the process still goes on, the gigantic body moves forward inch by inch and the green waves break the bergs from its face as the sun invades its structure; and so it lies there, dying slowly through the countless years, glorious, miraculous.

The Captain had promised to approach the face of the glacier as near as was reasonably safe and lie there at anchor for an hour, that the passengers might land at the side of the inlet and those who wished could explore the glacier.

An hour! What was an hour? Those sixty golden minutes would be gone in a flash. Yet it would be an hour of life, of deep emotion, face to face with this monster, strange relic of a forgotten world, stretched on its glorious death-bed.

I was alone still. Not another passenger had yet come up, and I could lean there undisturbed, trying to open my eyes still wider, to expand my heart, to stretch my brain, that I might drink in more of the inimitable grandeur and beauty round me.

The nearer we drew to the glacier the closer packed became the water with the floating bergs; they threatened the ship now on every side, and so slowly did we move we hardly seemed advancing. The bergs flashed and shone as they passed us, rayed through with jewel-like colours, and on one gliding by far from the ship's side I saw two seals at play. For many hundred miles past these seals were the only living things I had seen. The forests on the shore, so thick in the first part of the journey by the Alaskan coast, had long since given way to barren rocks, snow-capped peaks, and ice-filled clefts. No life seemed possible there, the wide distant blue above had shown no bird nor shadow of bird passing. There was no voice of insect nor the least of Nature's children here. Between the thunderous crash of the ice-falls that seemed to shiver the golden air there was intense and solemn stillness.

But the seals played merrily on their floating berg as they passed me, and I watched them long through field-glasses as the joyous, turbulent blue waves carried them far out of my sight towards the open sea.

The clanging of the breakfast bell made me leave my place and go down for a hurried breakfast. I was chilled through, for the early morning air is keen, the pure breath of infinite snowfields, and I took my coffee gratefully amongst the crowd of hungry passengers.

Rough miners some of them, going up to Sitka from the great Treadwell mine at Juneau, traders on their way to Fort Wrangle, and some few explorers. Amongst them were four men our boat had taken on board as we passed the mouth of the Stickeen river. They had started from Canada, lured by the light of the gold that lay under the snows of the Klondike, intending to travel there overland. Losing their way, they had wandered with their pack train for eighteen months in these vast solitudes of ice and snow, groping blindly towards the coast.

Food had failed them, their horses had died by the way from want or fatigue. Faced by starvation, the men had eaten those of their pack animals that had survived, then, finally, when hope had almost left them, they came in sight of the sea.

They were talking of this and their terrible conflict with snow-storm and ice-floe as I joined them, of the plans for making money with which they had started and their failure.

I got away from them all and went back to my place as soon as I could, and spent the rest of the morning as I had begun it, alone at the forward end.

There were very few passengers like myself. Not many people for mere pleasure would take that hazardous voyage along the coast, for it was new country and not a tenth of the sunken rocks and dangerous shoals were yet on any chart. All the way up along that rocky and treacherous shore we had seen the evidences of wreck and disaster everywhere. Above the flats of shimmering water, where the gold or crimson of sunset lay, rose constantly the tops of masts, shadowy and spectral, telling of the sunken hull, the pale corpses beneath those gleaming waves. Ship after ship went down out of those adventurous little coasting vessels that plied up and down the coast trading with the natives, and as we passed these half submerged masts, we often asked ourselves—"Will the Cottage City be more lucky?" She was trading, like all the other boats that go there, with the Alaskan natives, and to go as far north as the Muir was no part of the official programme.

But the fares of the few passengers who really wished to take all risks and go there was a temptation and overcame the fear of the dreaded Taku Inlet with its monstrous crashing bergs and its possibility of sudden and furious storms. So the little steamer was here, creeping up slowly through this vision of mystic blue towards the glacier, which lay there white, vast, shadowy, mysterious, and my heart beat quicker and quicker as we approached.

I went off in one of the first boats and the moment it touched the pebbly strand of the side of the inlet I jumped out and walked away, eager to be alone to enjoy the glory of it all away from the rasping voices, the worldly talk of my companions, the perpetual "littleness" of ideas that humanity drags with it everywhere.

As I turned from the boat the voices followed me clearly, distinctly, in the exquisite rarefied air.

Thin waves of laughter mingled with them from time to time, growing faint behind me, then the distance closed up between us and I heard no more.

The steamer had landed about thirty passengers and crew, and they seemed immediately lost in these vast expanses. When I had walked a few minutes up the beach from the water's edge, I looked round and was apparently alone. Some few black dots here and there disfiguring the snowy slopes and glittering ice-covered rocks was all that remained of them. In the midst of the vivid blue-green of the inlet behind me, a little wedge of black, lay the steamer, the only reminder that I was one also of these miserable black dots and in an hour I should be collected and taken away as one of them. For this hour, however, I was free and at one with the divine glory about me.

It was just noon. The sky was of a pale and perfect blue, the air still, of miraculous clearness and radiant with the pure light of the North, unshaded, unsoftened by the smallest mist or cloud. The silence was unbroken except for the regular thunder of the falling bergs, that continued with absolute precision at the five-minute interval, and the accompanying splash of the water. I walked on up the strand, having the great glistening wall of the glacier's face somewhat on my left. It was impossible to approach it on land, as the fervid green water lay deep all about its base. It was only at the side of the inlet that little beaches had been formed, and on one of these I stood. The steamer could not get nearer the glacier for fear of the floating bergs, and a small boat could only approach with deadliest peril at the risk of being crushed beneath the falling ice or swamped by the wild division and upheaval of the water that it caused.

But here, on the beach, was a world of enchantment second only in beauty to the glacier itself, for many of the bergs had been stranded there by the playful tides. They stood there now towering up in a thousand different forms, hundreds of feet above one's head, drawing all the light of the sunbeams into their glittering recesses, turning them there into violet, purple, and crimson hues, mauve, saffron, and emerald, blood-red and topaz, and then throwing them out in a million lance-like rays of colour, dazzling and blinding the vision. Like the most wonderful rainbows turned into solid masses they stood there, or like the jewels, rubies, sapphires, and diamonds broken from some giant's crown and scattered recklessly along the strand.

I went up to them and walked beneath an ice arch that glowed rose without as the sun touched it and deepest violet within. Then on, into a cave beyond where the last chamber was coldest white but the outer rim seemed hung with blood-red fire and the middle wall glowed deepest emerald. On, on from one to another, each like a perfect dream of exquisite colour: sunrise and sunset, and all the hues of earth that we ever see were blended together in those glorious bergs.

What a phantasmagoria of colour, what a wonderful vision! Wrapped up in the delight of it, I passed on through some and round others, pursuing my way up the beach, and ascended slowly the rocks, the huge morain at the side of the glacier, while impressively from the inlet came unvaryingly the thunder of the five-minute guns, hastening my steps, dogging them, as it were, with warning of the passing time.

After a heavy climb taken too quickly, when I put my foot first on the clear blue-green surface of the glacier, its immensity, its grandeur came home to me. The idea of the huge size of it seems to take the human mind in a curious grip and appal it. Three hundred and fifty square miles of ice stretched round me, white, unbroken, except here and there where gigantic fissures and ravines opened in its surface; ravines where deep blue-green colour glowed in the sides, as if it were the blue-green blood of the glacier. A tiny wind from the north, keen as a knife blade, blew in my face as I stood there, out of the calm blue sky, and seemed to whisper to me of the terrifying nights of storm, of the deadly wind before which all life goes down like a straw, that raged here in the winter. On every side, as far as the eyes could reach, wide white plains of undulating ice and snow, broken here and there by patches of barren rock, that seemed now by some optical delusion, against the glaring white, to be of the brightest mauve and violet tints. Only that; ice and snow and rock for mile upon mile, until the tale of three hundred and fifty is told. No track or trace of bird, no sweet companionship of little furred, four-footed things, no blade of grass or smallest plant or flower, no sound but the roar of the riven ice, the groans of the dying glacier.

I walked on slowly, looking inland towards the white fields stretching away endlessly into the distance till the blue of the sky seems to come down and mingle with the blue shadows in the snow. Beneath my feet glimmered sometimes the green glass-like surface of smooth ice, at others the thin crisp covering of drifted snow crackled at every step. Sometimes the crevasses were so narrow one could easily walk over them, others yawned widely, many yards across, necessitating a long detour to pass round them.

Looking back from the side of one of them as I walked up it to find the narrowest part, I saw the objectionable black dots had swarmed up on to the edge of the glacier and through the thin, glittering air their voices and laughter at intervals came faintly to me. I sprang over the crevasse and walked on quickly to a point where the fissures grew thick about my feet and the green-blue blood of the glacier glowed in them on every side.

I was looking now down the inlet and was near enough to the face of the glacier to hear, though dulled by distance, the crash of the falling bergs into the foaming water beneath. I could not approach nearer for crevasses hemmed me in; the ice showed itself clear of snow and was so slippery I could hardly stand. One false step now, one small slip and I should disappear down one of these green rents, swallowed up in between those gleaming crystal sides to remain one with the glacier for all time. My idea had been to approach the face of the glacier from the top, but I found this to be as impossible, by reason of the crevasses, as it had been to approach it from the sea on account of the falling bergs.

Sacred, inaccessible, guarded above and below, the great gleaming wall stood there through the centuries, defying the puny curiosity, the feeble efforts of man to even gaze upon it and marvel over it, except from a long distance. I would have given all I had to have been able to advance to the very edge and, kneeling there, look over it down those majestic palisades of white flushed through with green, throwing back to the sun, their destroyer and conqueror, a thousand flashing rays as if in defiance of the slow death being dealt out to them, like one who dies brandishing to the last his sword in the face of his enemy. I longed to look over, down the glimmering wall, to the swelling rush of the green waters as they leapt up rejoicing to receive the colossal diamond-like berg as it crashed down to them, to see them seethe over it and fling their spray high up in the sunshine in mocking revelry; but it was impossible. The fissures in the ice multiplied themselves as one neared the edge and now were spread round my feet in a perfect network, like the meshes of a snare. It was impossible to go forward, and I was unwilling to go back. I stood motionless on a little tongue of polished ice between two blue-green chasms, so deep that they seemed riven down to the very heart of the glacier; stood there, drinking in the keen gold air and the beauty of the blue arch above, of the boundless spaces of glittering white round me, of the narrow green inlet so far below from which echoed the reverberating roar of the falling ice.

I was debating with myself, should I stay here alone for a time, letting the steamer go, after having stored some provisions for me on the shore, and call again for me a few weeks later, in any case before the short summer of these northern latitudes was over, and winter closed the inlet?

To stay here alone, the one single human being, in a thousand miles of space, and not only the one human being, but the one life, with no companionship of animal, bird, or insect, that would be an experience of solitude indeed!

The idea attracted me; all day and all night to hear nothing but that thunderous roar, and see nothing but the shining sea, the gleaming ice-fields, and the glittering bergs, to be alone with Nature, to see her, as it were, intimately in her awful beauty, with breast and brow unveiled—and, perhaps, have death as one's reward!

There was fascination in the thought.

What ideas would come to one as one watched the little steamer, the only link that held one still bound to the world of men, weigh anchor and steam slowly down the green inlet, departing and leaving one behind it, as one watched it growing smaller, dwindling ever, till it was a mere speck, and then saw it vanish, leaving the green riband of water unbroken save for the passing bergs? How one would realise solitude when the boat had absolutely disappeared, and how that solitude would thrill through and through one's blood as the long light night rolled by and dawn and day succeeded with their unvarying march of silent glittering hours!

And if death came on the wings of a storm such as rises suddenly in these regions and piled high the snow over the camp, freezing the inmate, or if it came by slow starvation, the steamer having been lost on that dangerous rocky coast and none other having come in time, how would death seem to one here, already so far removed from men and all desire and lust of the world, here, where already all earthly things had almost ceased to be and one's spirit had merged into the Infinite?

Death would seem to one in different guise from when he comes to us in the midst of the delights of the world, with the baubles of life around us, or in the stress of the battle-field in the moment of victory, surrounded by our comrades.

Death here would come but as the crown, the climax to the solitude, the detachment, the isolation, would seem but as the laying down the head on the breast of Nature, becoming one with her immensity, her grandeur.

For some minutes I was keenly tempted to stay, the idea held my mind and fascinated it, but with the vision of death came the recoil from it born from the remembrance of my art. The same recoil that had saved me many times before, for youth is usually greatly inclined to suicide, either directly or indirectly in the dangers it courts. But in an artist this is strangely balanced by his love for his work. When he has ceased to wish for life or heed it for himself he still feels instinctive revolt against extinguishing that diviner spark than life itself, his genius, lent him from the celestial fire.

The thought of my work dispelled the enchanted dream into which I had fallen. Instinctively I turned and very slowly began to retrace my steps amongst the yawning pitfalls. As I did so I heard a hoarse hoot from the steamer lying below, to tell me it was about to leave, another and another resounded dully from it, warning me to hasten my return.

I made my way back to the shore where the boat and the impatient sailors awaited me. I took my seat in it, turning my eyes to the glistening, glimmering white palisade rising over the sapphire sea.

When we had reached the steamer and its head was turned round I stood at the stern and watched that palisade for long, as it receded and receded. At last the blue distance swallowed it up. I could see no more than a silvery line dividing the blues of meeting sea and sky. Then I went down to my cabin and locked the door and lay down on my berth in the quiet, trying to live over again that one hour of close contact with the beauty of the North.

After dinner that night I wrote a long letter to my cousin Viola about the beauty of the Muir. She would understand, I knew. What I thought she would feel, for our brains were cast in the same mould. The letter finished, it was still too early to go to bed; so I picked up a curious book called "Life's Shop Window" which I had been reading the previous night, and read this passage which had struck me before, over again:

"So, as we look into our future, we see ourselves beloved and wealthy; victorious, famous, and free to wander through the sweetest paths of the world, passing through a thousand scenes, sometimes loving, sometimes warring, tasting and drinking of everything sweet and stimulating, knowing all things, enjoying all in turn; but this is the life of a God, not a man. And it is perhaps the God in us which so savagely demands the life of a God."

"But it is not granted to us."

Yet this was the life I was trying to lead, and to some extent I succeeded. Change, change, it is the life of life, perhaps especially to the artist.

And I was an artist now, thanks to the decision of the Royal Academy last year to accept the worst picture I had submitted to them for four years. Ever since my fingers could clasp round anything at all they had loved to hold a brush; for years in my teens I had studied painting under the best teachers of technique in Italy. For two or three years I had done really good work, with the divine afflatus thrilling through every vein. And last year I had painted rather a commonplace picture and it had been hung on the line in the Academy, and so my friends all said I really was an artist now, and I modestly accepted the style and title, with outward diffidence.

How little any of them guessed, as they congratulated me, of the wild rapture of feeling, of intense gratitude with which I had listened to the Divine whisper that had come to my ears as a boy of seventeen sitting in a small bare bedroom, on the floor with the sheet of paper before me on which I had drawn a woman's head. As I looked at it, I knew suddenly my power, and the Voice that is above all others said within me: "I have made you an artist. None can undo or dispute MY work."

From that moment I cared for neither praise nor blame. The opinion of men affected me not at all. My gift was mine, and I knew it. I held it straight from the Divine hands. I had the Divine promise with me for as long as I should live on this earth.

And I was filled with a boundless delight in life and my own powers.

When I showed my original pictures all painted under inspiration to my father, he carefully put on his pince-nez and studied them very closely. After that he said he must reserve his judgment. When they went to the Academy and were promptly refused, he drew a long face and said I had better have gone into the Indian Civil Service as he wished. Subsequently, when I had sold them all, and not one for less than a thousand guineas, he began to enter upon a placid state of contentment with me which induced him to say to other captious relations—"Let the boy alone, he will be an artist some day." At which I used to laugh inwardly and go away to my studio to listen to the Divine voice dictating fresh pictures to me. For five years in Italy I had studied closely and worked unremittingly, keeping myself for my art alone and existing only in it. My teachers had called me industrious. Another phrase which always must make an artist laugh when applied to his art.

To those who know the wild pleasure, the almost mad joy of exercising a really natural gift, it sounds as funny as to talk of a drunkard industriously getting drunk.

However, this by the way. The world is the world, and artists are artists; the artist may understand the world, but the world can never understand the artist.

I was happy, life passed like a golden dream till I was twenty-two, and my father was satisfied that I was an "industrious" student.

From twenty-two till now, when I was twenty-eight, life had opened out into fuller colour still. My art remained the life of the soul, of all that was best in me, but the brain and the senses had come forward, demanding their share of recognition, too, and out of the many coloured strands of which we can weave our web of life, I had chosen that which gleams the next brightest to art, the strand of passion, and woven much with that.

I had travelled, passing from country to country, city to city, finding love and inspiration everywhere, for the world is full of both for those who desire and look for them, and now I had come on this coasting trip along the shores of Alaska in the same spirit, looking for pictures in the golden atmosphere, for joy in the golden days and nights.

My sketch-book was full of ideas and jottings, and I looked forward much to the landing at Sitka where I hoped to find new and good material. The hopeless ugliness of the Alaskan natives had so far appalled me. An artist chiefly of the face and figure, as I was, could not hope to find a model amongst them. As our steamer had come up the coast I had looked in vain for even a decent-sized woman or child amongst them. They seem a race without a single beauty, possessing neither stature, nor colour, nor length of hair, nor even plump shapeliness. Undersized, leather-skinned, small-eyed, thin, and wizened, they never seem to be young. They seem to start middle-aged and go on growing older.

No, I had really had no luck at present on my Alaskan tour, but I was naturally sanguine and hoped still something from Sitka.

Most capitals give you something if you visit them, and Sitka was the capital of Alaska.

As I lay in my berth that night, made wakeful by the bright light, I was thinking over past incidents in my life and all the Minnies and Marys that had been connected with them. They seemed all to have been Mary or Minnie with Marias in Italy and France. I fell asleep at last, hoping whatever Fate had in store for me at Sitka, it wouldn't be a Mary or a Minnie, but some new name embodying a new idea.

CHAPTER II

THE TEA-SHOP

When we landed at Sitka I went ashore with a fellow passenger. He was a clever man, and had made trips up there already for the sake of taking photographs of the people and the scenery; he knew Sitka well and came up to me just before we arrived there with the remark:

"If you come with me I'll take you to have tea with the prettiest girl you've ever seen."

This certainly seemed an invitation to accept, and I did so on the spot.

"She really is," he continued, observing my sceptically raised eyebrows, "wonderfully pretty. She keeps a tea-shop and she is Chinese." With that he bolted into his own cabin, which was next mine, and as I heard him laughing, I concluded he was joking and thought no more about it. However, as the ship glided up over flat sheets of golden water to the landing-stage, he joined me again, and together we stood looking up the principal street of Sitka which runs down to meet the little quay.

It was just four in the afternoon, and everything was vivid living gold, as the floods of yellow sunshine filled all the shining air. The green copper dome of the church alone stood out a soft spot of delicate colour in the dazzling burnished haze.

At the sides of the street sat and crouched the small squat figures of the Alaskan Indians, each with a mat before it on which the owner had set out his little store of wares—bottles of various-coloured sands, reindeer slippers beautifully embroidered in blue beads, carved walrus teeth.

We stepped on the shore and the Indians looked up at us with quaint brown questioning eyes, like their own seals.

They did not ask you to buy, but watched you silently.

"Come along," said my friend, "we'll go up and get tea before there's a crowd."

After about five minutes' walk, while I was gazing about interested in this quaint little capital, my companion suddenly exclaimed:

"In here," and turned through an opening at the corner of a square enclosure on our right hand. I followed, and saw we had entered a little square court or compound, similar to those with which the poorer classes in any Eastern community surround their huts.

The floor was dried and hardened mud, the walls about seven feet high, and numerous small tables laid for tea stood round them.

My companion did not pause here, however, but went straight through in at the low house door, and we found ourselves in a very small, dark passage, hung with red and with red cloths dangling from the ceiling, that swept our heads as we came in.

It seemed quite dark inside, coming from the fierce gold light of the streets, but there was a dim little lamp in Eastern glass of many colours swinging somewhere at the farther end, and we found our way down to a low door in the side of the passage. This brought us into a small square room which gave the impression of being sunk below the level of the street. There were diminutive windows in the outer wall, but they were close to the low ceiling and though the glorious light from without tried hard to come in, it was successfully obstructed by little rush blinds of red and green. The rushes were placed vertically side by side and fastened together with string and painted in bright tints. The breeze from the sea came through them and sang a low song of its own. The walls were hung with red stuff curtains, over which ramped wonderful Chinese dragons in green; the floor was spread with something soft, on which the feet made no sound; in the corners of the room stood some little tables.

To the farthest of these, under the rush-covered windows, we made our way and sat down on some very ordinary American chairs, a hideous note in the quaint surrounding, introduced as a concession, no doubt, to Western taste.

"I rather like this, Morley," I said as I took my seat and looked round.

"Thought you would," he returned, and pressed his hand on a tiny bronze figure standing on the table. At the touch of his finger the head of the figure disappeared between its shoulders, and then sprung up again, producing a harsh clanging sound of a gong.

Hardly a moment later the red curtains that hung over the doorway parted, and a figure came into the room.

Such a sweet figure, the very spirit of poetic girlhood seemed incarnate before us.

In appearance she was a Chinese maiden of seventeen or eighteen years; seventeen or eighteen according to our standard of looks, doubtless she was in reality younger.

The face was wonderfully beautiful, a very rounded oval and of the most perfect creamy tint, the nose, straight and fine, was rather long, the upper lip short, and the mouth very small, soft, and full-lipped. The eyes inclined a little to the Chinese shape, but were large, wide, and well-opened and brimming to the lids with extraordinary light and fire; delicately narrow black eyebrows arched above on the low satiny forehead, from which was brushed upwards a mass of shining black hair piled on the top of the small head and apparently secured there by two weighty gold pins thrust through from side to side.

The last touch of beauty, if any were needed, was added by the earrings of turquoise-blue stone that swung against the ivory-tinted softness of the full young throat.

Those blue stones against the creamy neck! For years afterwards how I could see them again in the darkness that lies behind closed lids! How often I was back in the crimson darkness of the tiny chamber with the sea song of the Alaskan waves coming through the painted rushes above my head!

She was very simply dressed, yet so fitly to her own beauty.

A straight pale blue jacket covered her shoulders and opened on the breast over a white muslin vest. Her skirts hung like the full trousers of Persian women, and were a deep yellow in colour. Her feet were bare, and shone white on the red floor.

"How do you do, Suzee?" said Morley.

"How do you do, Mister Morlee," returned the girl lightly, smiling and showing pretty little teeth as she did so.

"You two gentlemen want some tea? Very good. I make it."

She glided to the curtains and disappeared as rapidly and noiselessly as she had entered.

I turned to Morley with enthusiasm.

"She's lovely, perfect."

"Isn't she just? I knew you'd say so. But she's married, old man, so don't you think you can go playing any tricks with her."

"Married?" I gasped incredulously, "that child? Impossible! You're joking."

"I'm not, 'pon my honour. She has a great roaring brute of a baby, too."

"How horrible!" I exclaimed. "Yes, horrible. You've spoiled it all. It seems a sacrilege."

"Fiddlesticks," returned my practical friend. "That's the sort that does these things, isn't it? Would you expect her to turn into an old maid?"

"No, but so young!" I faltered. In reality it was a shock to me. To have such an exquisite sight float before one for a moment, and then to be roughly dragged down to earth from the exaltation it had caused, hurt and bruised me.

The next moment she was back again, bearing a tray in her hands which she set on our table, and deftly arranged the steaming teapot and tiny cups before us.

As she bent near us over the little table a strange sensation of delight came over me, a faint scent of roses reached me from the little buds behind her ear. The blue stones in the long gold earrings swung against her neck of cream as she set out the tea things.

"How is your boy, Suzee?" asked Morley with a tone of mischief in his voice.

"He is very well, thank you, Mister Morlee."

"I should like to see him. Will you bring him in?" he continued, commencing to pour out the tea.

"Yes; he is asleep now, but I will wake him up," she returned nonchalantly, and, in spite of a protestation from me, she went out to do so.

After a minute we heard loud screams from across the passage and presently Suzee reappeared dragging (I can use no other phrase) in her arms an enormous baby. Its face was red, and it was roaring lustily. The girl-mother did not seem disturbed in the least by its cries, but staggered slowly over to us, clasping the child awkwardly round the waist and holding it flat against her own body.

It seemed very large, out of all proportion to the small and exquisitely dainty mother. She was short and small, and the child really, as I looked at it, seemed to be quite half the length of her own body.

"What a big boy he is," remarked Morley.

"Yes, isn't he?" said the mother proudly.

The baby roared its loudest, tears streamed down its scarlet face, and it dug its clenched knuckles furiously into its eyes.

"Surely it's in pain," I suggested.

"Oh, he always cries when he is woken up," returned the mother tranquilly. She did not seem to take the least notice of the child's bellowing. She might have been deaf for all the effect it had upon her. She stood there placidly holding it, though it seemed very heavy for her, while the child screamed itself purple. She began a conversation with Morley just precisely as if the child were non-existent.

I never saw such a picture, and it struck me suddenly I should like to paint it, just as it was there, and call the thing "Maternity."

But no. What would be the good? No one, certainly not the British public, would ever believe its truth.

They would think it a joke, and a grotesque one at that. "Beauty and the Beast" would do for a name, I mused, or "Fact and Fancy."

Nothing could be more delicately soul-absorbingly beautiful than the mother; nothing so brutally hideous as the child.

Suzee had sat down on the floor now, and the baby, still roaring, had rolled on to its face on the ground beside her. Still she took not the smallest notice of it; she laid one shapely hand on the small of its back, as if to make sure it was there, and continued her conversation tranquilly with Morley. How she could hear what he said I could not tell. I could hear nothing but the appalling row the child made.

"Do take it away," I said after a few moments more, in an interval of yells, during which the baby rolled, apparently in the last stages of suffocation, on the floor. "I can't stand that noise."

"Ah!" said Suzee meditatively, lifting her glorious almond eyes to mine, "you do not like my boy-baby?"

"I do not like the noise he makes," I said evasively, "and I don't think he can be well, either."

"Oh yes, he is quite well," she returned composedly; "but I will take him away."

So saying, she began to haul at the loose things about the child's waist, as a tired gardener hauls at a sack of potatoes prior to lifting it up.

I thought really she would get the child into her arms head downwards, so carelessly did she seem to manage it, and as she rose and carried it to the door it seemed as if the awkward weight of it must strain her own slight body.

When the curtain closed behind her and the screams got faint in the distance as the unhappy child was hauled to a back room, I drew a breath of relief and began to drink my tea, which really hitherto I had been too nervous to do. Morley chuckled and remarked:

"Good for you to be disillusioned."

"I'm not in the least, with her. She is a divine piece of physical beauty. I wish I could get her on my canvas."

"You won't be able to; that old curmudgeon of a husband of hers will see to that."

"I should think he has the devil of a temper, judging by his offspring," I answered. "She looks sweet enough."

Morley nodded, and we finished our tea in silence. Suzee came back presently with cigarettes for us and sat down on the floor herself, rolling one up between supple fingers. She had an air of extraordinary unruffled placidity. The dragging about of the child had not disturbed her dress nor heated her face. In cool, tranquil, placid beauty she sat and rolled cigarettes while the child's cries dimly echoed in the distance.

"Where's the boss, Suzee?" questioned Morley presently.

"He has gone down to Fort Wrangle for two days," she returned, and my spirits leapt up at her words. Her husband away for two days! Perhaps there was a chance for a picture….

My eyes swept over her seated on the floor in front of us. What exquisite supple lines! What sweet little dainty curves showed beneath the blue silk jacket and sleeve! What a glory of light and passionate expression in the liquid dark eyes when she raised them to us!

After a few minutes Morley got up, and I saw him laying down on the table the money for our tea. I added my share, and Morley remarked,

"We'd better go and walk about before dinner, hadn't we? You'd like a look round?"

I was gazing at Suzee.

"Do you have any time to yourself?" I asked her. "Later in the evening perhaps when you could come for a walk with me."

Suzee looked up. There was surprise in those wonderful eyes, but I thought I saw pleasure too.

"At six," she said. "I close the restaurant for a short time, but I don't walk, I smoke and go to sleep. But I will come with you if it is not too far," she added as an after-thought.

Morley gave a whistle, indicative of surprise and disapproval, but I answered composedly.

"Very well, I shall come here at six; so don't be asleep and fail to let me in!"

Suzee laughed and shook her head, and we picked up our hats and went out of the little room into the passage. In the outer court, as we passed through, we saw most of the tables occupied, and an elderly woman serving.

"We had the best of it," I remarked.

"Yes, rather. But you are going ahead with that girl. Do be careful or you'll have the old terror of a husband down on you."

"You introduced me," I returned laughing. "You have all the responsibility."

"You know dinner's at six on this unearthly boat. Aren't you going to get any dinner to-night?"

"I'm not very particular about it. I shall pick up something. I thought six when all the men would be back on board would be her free time."

"But what are you going to do with her?"

"Get her to pose for me, if she will."

"Anything else?"

"One never knows in life," I answered smiling.

Morley regarded me thoughtfully.

"You artists do manage to have a good time."

"You could have just the same if you chose," I said.

"No, I don't think I could somehow," he answered slowly. "I am not so devilishly good-looking as you are, for one thing."

"Oh, I don't know," I replied; "and does that make much difference with women, do you think? Isn't it rather a passionate responsiveness, a go-aheadness, that they like?"

"Yes, I think it is, but then that's it, you've got that. I don't think I have. I don't seem to want the things, to see anything in them, as you do."

I laughed outright. We were walking slowly down one of the gold, light-filled streets towards the church now, and everything about us seemed vibrating in the dazzling heat.

"If you don't want them I should think it's all right." I said.

"No, it isn't," returned my companion gravely. "You want a thing very much and you get it, and have no end of fun. I don't want it and don't get it, and don't have the fun. So it makes life very dull."

"Well, I am very jolly," I admitted contentedly. "I think really, artists—people with the artist's brain—do enjoy everything tremendously. They have such a much wider field of desires, as you say; and fewer limitations. They 'weave the web Desire,' as Swinburne says, 'to snare the bird Delight.'"

"They get into a mess sometimes," said Morley sulkily; "as you will with that girl if you don't look out. Here we are at the church. There's a very fine picture inside; you'd like to see it, I expect."

We turned into the church and rested on the chairs for a few minutes, enjoying the cool dark interior.

At six o'clock exactly I was in the little mud-yard again, before the tea-shop; having sent Morley off to his dinner on board. I felt elated: all my pulses were beating merrily. I was keenly alive. Morley was right in what he said. An artist is Nature's pet, and she has mixed all his blood with joy. Natural, instinctive joy, swamped occasionally by melancholy, but always there surging up anew. Joy in himself—joy in his powers—joy in life.

I knocked as arranged, and Suzee herself let me in. She had been burning spice, apparently, before one of the idols that stood in each corner of the tea-shop; for the whole place smelt of it.

"What have you been doing?" I said. "Holding service here?"

"Only burning spice-spills to chase away the evil spirits," replied
Suzee.

"Are there any here?" I inquired.

"They always come in with the white foreign devils," she returned with engaging frankness.

I laughed.

"Well, Suzee, you are unkind," I expostulated. "Is that how you think of me?"

She looked up with a calm smile.

"The devil is always welcomed by a woman," she answered sweetly—her eyes were black lakes with fire moving in their depths—"that is one of our proverbs. It is quite true."

The lips curled and the creamy satin of the cheeks dimpled and the blue earrings shook against her neck.

"What lovely earrings," I said, smiling down upon her, and put up my hand gently to touch one. She did not draw back nor seem to resent my action.

"You think them pretty? I have others upstairs. Will you come up and see my jewellery?"

I assented with the greatest willingness, and we went on down the passage and then up the narrow, steep flight of stairs at the end.

"Don't wake up your child," I said in sudden horror, as we reached the small square landing above of slender rickety uncovered boards.

"Oh, he never wakes till one pulls him up," she answered tranquilly, and led the way into a little chamber. Did she sleep here? I wondered. There was no bed, but a loose heap of red rugs in one corner. The windows were mere narrow horizontal slits close to the ceiling. In the centre, blocking up all the space, stood a high narrow chest. It looked very old, of blackened wood and antique shape. I had never seen such a thing. On the top of this, which nearly came to her chin, she eagerly spread out heaps of little paper parcels she took from one of the drawers.

"Have you any earrings just like those you are wearing?" I asked her. If she had, I would buy them if I could for my cousin Viola, I thought. Viola was excessively fair, and those blue stones would be enchanting against her blonde hair.

"You want to buy them?" she said quickly. "I have a pair here just like, only green. Buy those."

"No," I said. "It is the colour I like. Do you want to sell these blue ones you are wearing?"

"No," she said quickly; "not these," and ran to a small mirror on the wall and looked in hastily, fearfully, as if she thought that by wishing for them I could charm them away from her out of her very ears.

That she appreciated so well the effect of the colour harmony between the blue stones and her own cream-hued skin, and the value of it in setting off her beauty, pleased me. It seemed to augur well for her artistic sense.

"May I sit down here?" I asked her, going to the pile of scarlet rugs and cushions in the corner.

"Oh yes, Meester Treevor, sit down," and she came hastily forward to rearrange them for me with Oriental politeness. I sat down, drawing up my legs as I best could, and pointed to a place beside me.

"Come and sit down, Suzee," I said; "I have something to show you now."

She came and sat beside me, but not very close, with her knees raised and her smooth lissom little hands clasped round them. Her almond eyes grew almost round with curiosity. I had brought with me a small portfolio of some of my sketches with the object of introducing the subject of her posing for me. I opened it and drew out the topmost sketch. It was the figure of a young Italian girl lying on a green bank beneath some vines. She was not wholly undraped, but most of her attire was on the bank beside her, and the rest was of a transparent gauzy nature suited to the heat suggested in the sunlit picture.

The moment Suzee's eyes fell upon it she gave a shriek of dismay and covered her face with her hands. Over any portion I could still see of it spread the Eastern's equivalent of a blush: a sort of dull heavy red that seems to thicken the tissues.

"What is the matter?" I asked, surveying her in surprise. There was nothing in the picture which would cause the least embarrassment to any English girl.

"Oh, Treevor, it is dreadful to look at things like that," she exclaimed, moving her fingers before her face and looking at me with one eye through them. Then she made some rapid passes over her head, as if to ward off the evil spirits I had conjured up.

I laughed.

"You may think so, Suzee," I said; "but in our country, and many others, these 'things,' as you call them, are not only very much looked at, but also admired, and bought and sold for great sums. What do you see so very bad in it?"

Suzee ventured to peer through her fingers with both eyes at the fearful object.

"Dreadful!" she exclaimed again, quickly shutting her fingers. "It is a very bad woman, is it not?"

"No," I said, somewhat nettled; "certainly not. This was quite a respectable girl. I have quantities of these portraits and sketches. Look here," and I opened the portfolio and spread out several pictures on the rug.

Suzee drew herself together, tightly pursed up her and looked down at them with alarm,—as if I had let loose a number of snakes.

"They are very, very wicked things," she said, primly as a dissenting minister's wife; and lowered her eyelids till the lashes lay like black silk on the cheeks.

I gathered the offending sketches together and pushed them back under cover.

"I wanted you to pose for me," I said, "that I might have your picture, too; but I expect you won't do so for me?"

"I! I!" said Suzee, with virtuous indignation, "be put on paper like that? I would die first." Her face had thickened all over as the blood went into it. Her eyes looked stormy, alluring.

I leant towards her suddenly as we sat side by side, put my arms round her waist, drew her to me, and pressed my lips on the ridiculous little screwed-up mouth, with a sudden access of passion that left her breathless.

"You are a horrid little humbug, and goose, and prude," I said, laughing, as I released her. "What do you think of letting me kiss you like that, then? Is that wrong?"

Suzee sighed heavily, swaying her pliable body only a very little way from me.

"It may be—a little" she admitted; "but it's not like the pictures."

"Oh! It's not so bad—not so wicked?" I asked mockingly.

"Oh no, not nearly," she returned decisively.

"Well," I answered, "many people would think it much worse. Those girls who have let me draw them would not let me kiss them—some of them," I added. "So, you see, it's a matter of opinion and idea. Now, will you say why the picture is so much worse than a kiss?"

"A kiss," murmured Suzee, "is just between two people. It is done, and no one knows. It is gone." She spread out her hands and waved them in the air with an expressive gesture. "Those things remain a monument of shame for ever and ever."

I laughed. I was beginning to see there was not much chance of a picture, but other prospects seemed fair. In life one must always take exactly what it offers, and neither refuse its goods nor ask for more, either in addition or exchange. Sitka would give me something, but perhaps not a picture as I had hoped.

I looked at her in silence for some seconds, musing on her curious beauty.

"I shall call you 'Sitkar-i-buccheesh,'" I said after a minute.

Suzee looked frightened and made a rapid pass over her head.

"What is that?" she asked. "It sounds a devil's name."

"It only means the gift of Sitka," I answered. "This city has given you to me, has it not? or it will," I added in a lower tone.

I put my arm round her again, and she leant towards me as a flower swayed by the breeze, her head drooped and rested against my shoulder.

"If it were the name of a devil," I said laughing, "it would suit you.
I believe you are an awful little devil."

"All women are devils," returned Suzee placidly.

I did not answer, but Viola's face swam suddenly before my vision—a face all white and gold and rose and with eyes of celestial blue.

"What would your husband say to all this?" I asked jestingly.

"He will never know. I tell him quite different. He believes everything I say."

Involuntarily I felt a little chill of disgust pass through me. Deceit of any kind specially repels me, and deceit towards some one trusting, confident, is the worst of all.

Perhaps she read my thoughts instinctively, for she said next, in a pleading note, to enlist my sympathies:

"He is very, very cruel, he beats me all the time."

I looked down at her as she lay in the cradle of my arm, a little sceptical.

From what I knew of the Chinese character it did not seem at all likely that Hop Lee did beat his wife; moreover, the delicate, fragile, untouched beauty of the girl did not allow one to imagine she had suffered, or could suffer much violence.

Again she seemed to feel my doubt of her, for she pushed up suddenly her sleeve with some trouble from one velvet-skinned arm and pushed it up before my eyes. There was a deep dull crimson mark upon it the size of a half-crown.

"Unbeliever! Look at this bruise."

I looked at it, then at her steadily.

"Suzee, did your husband make that bruise?"

"Yes. He pinched me so hard in a rage with me," she said a little sulkily.

"Give me your arm," I said.

She held it out reluctantly. I looked at the bruise, then I rolled the sleeve back a little farther, and in it found a heavy gold bangle with a boss on one side corresponding with the size of the mark on the flesh.

"I think it is the gold bracelet your kind old husband gave you that you have pressed into the flesh," I said, "that has marked it. That is about what his cruelty to you amounts to." I dropped her arm contemptuously, and rose suddenly.

She had succeeded in dispelling for the moment the charm of her beauty. Her prudery, her deceit, her lies made up to me a peculiarly obnoxious mixture.

She sprang up, too, as I rose and threw herself on her knees, clasping her arms round mine so that I could not move.

"Oh Treevor, I do love you so much. You are my real master, not he. A woman loves a man who conquers her, but not by buying her. But because he is better and stronger than she. Because he has great muscles, as you have, and could kill her, and because she can't deceive him, because he sees all her lies, as you do. Yes, Treevor, I love you now very much indeed. Come here again, kiss me again."

But somehow her pleading did not move me. The moment when I had been drawn to her had gone by, swallowed up in a feeling of disgust.

I stooped down and unlocked her hands and put her back among her cushions.

"Good-bye, Suzee, for to-day," I said. "To-morrow I will come and take you for a walk. You must let me go now. I do not want to stay any longer."

She looked at me in silence, but did not offer to move from where I had put her.

I gathered up my portfolio and left the room, went down the stairs and through the passage and courtyard to the sun-filled street.

I went on slowly, and after a time found myself close to the church again. I went in, for the interior interested me, and found service was being held. A Russian priest, wholly in white clothing, stood before the altar, the cross light from the aisle windows falling on the long twist of fair hair that lay upon his shoulders. The whole air was full of incense that rose in white clouds to the domed roof. I sat down near the door and listened while the priest intoned a Latin hymn. The figure of the young priest at the altar attracted me. I thought I should like a sketch of it; but I hesitated to take one of him in the church, even surreptitiously, so I fixed the picture of him as he stood there on my eyes as far as I could, and then, in a convenient pause of the service, quietly slipped outside.

Near the church was a great outcrop of rock surmounted by a weather-beaten tree. In the shade thrown by these I got out a sheet of loose paper and made a sketch of the fair, long-haired priest, with the quaint frame building of the church, its green copper dome and bell tower and double gold crosses behind him.

After I had been there some time I was suddenly surprised by Morley.

"Hullo!" he exclaimed. "You here? Why, I thought you would be in the arms of the fair Suzee by this time."

"So I might have been," I answered, looking up from the sketch, "but I got put off somehow, so I left her and went to church instead!"

Morley burst out laughing.

"You are the funniest fellow," he exclaimed, taking his seat beside me on the ground and clasping his hands round his knees. "So Suzee has offended you, has she? Do you know, I think that's where we ordinary people get ahead of fellows like you. You are too sensitive. We're not so particular. When I'm stuck on Mary Ann it doesn't matter to me what she says or does. It doesn't interfere with my happiness."

I went on painting in silence.

"Funny those chaps look with their long hair, don't they?" he remarked after a moment, as I painted the light on the priest's long curl.

"Very picturesque, don't you think?" I said.

"No, I don't," returned the Briton stoutly. "I think it's beastly."

I laughed this time, and having completed the portrait, slipped it into my portfolio and prepared to put away my paints.

"Don't you want any dinner?" asked Morley. "You must be hungry."

"Well, I hadn't thought of it," I answered. "But, now you mention it, perhaps I am. Do you know of any place where one can get anything?"

"There's one place at the end of the town where you can have soup and bread," replied Morley, and we started off to find it.

Later on, towards ten o'clock, when we were leaving the little, frame, sailors' restaurant, I looked up to the western sky and saw that strange colour in it of the Alaskan sunset that I have never found in any other sky, a bright magenta, or deep heather pink, a crude colour rather like an aniline dye, but brilliant and arresting in the clean, clear gold of the heavens.

Great ribs and bars and long flat lines of it lay all across the West. No other cloud, no other colour appeared anywhere in the sky. It was painted in those two tints alone; the brightest magenta conceivable and living gold.

Walking back slowly to the ship, I gazed at it with interest. No other sky that I could recall ever shows this tone of colour. Pink, scarlet, rose, and all the shades of blood or flame-colour are familiar in every sunset, but this curious tint seemed to belong to Alaska alone.

I watched it glow and deepen, then fade, and softly disappear as the sun dipped below the horizon.

CHAPTER III

IN THE WOOD

The next evening, after dinner, I left the ship and made my way to
Suzee's place to take her for the promised walk.

It was just seven when I stepped ashore, and light of the purest, most exquisite gold lay over everything. The air had that special quality of Alaska which I have never met anywhere else, an extreme humidity; it hung upon the cheek as a mist hangs, only it was clear as crystal, brilliant as a yellow diamond.

There was no wind, not a breath ruffled the stillness nor stirred the motionless blue water.

The exquisite chain of islands off the mainland was mirrored in the still, shining depths, and lifted their delicate outlines clothed with fir and larch, soft as half-forgotten dreams, against the transparent blue of the sky. Sitka was placid and restful, the streets quiet and empty as I walked along in the sunny silence.

Suzee was at the door waiting for me. She had dressed herself differently, entirely in yellow. The yellow silk of the little square jacket contrasted well with her midnight hair, and the only dash of other colour in the picture she presented was the blue stone in her earrings.

"Good evening, Treevor," she said, smiling up at me. And I bent down and pressed my lips to those little, soft, curved ones she put up for me.

We started out at once. Suzee told me we were going for a long way to see the wood, and had the important air of a person going on a lengthy expedition. She had brought a Japanese sunshade with her which she put up, and certainly the hot light falling through the rice-paper had a wonderfully beautiful effect on her creamy skin and soft yellow silk clothing. She walked easily, only with rather short steps. As she was of the lower class, there had been no question of the "golden lilies" or distortion of the feet for her, and they were small and prettily shaped, bare, save for a sort of sandal, or as the Indians call them, "guaraches," bound under the sole.

We passed up the main street and soon after turned into a narrow winding road that leads along the coast, Sitka being on a promontory, with a beautiful azure bay running inland behind it.

Our path ran sometimes inland, through portions of wood, part of that great impenetrable primeval forest that at one time completely covered the whole of Sitka, sometimes quite on the edge of the water. Here there were rocks and boulders, and little coves of white sand and stretches of miniature beaches, with the lip of the bay resting on them.

Infinitesimal waves broke on the sunny white sand with a low musical tinkle, across the bay one could see the delicate chain of islands rising with their feathery trees into the blue, warding off the breakers and the storms of the open sea beyond. In here, the peaceful water murmured to itself and repeated tales of the beginning of the world, of the first gold dawn that broke upon the earth, and of later days, when the sombre black forests came to the water's edge and none knew them but the great black bear, and when the seals played joyously, undisturbed, in the fog-banks off the islands. I was in the mood to appreciate deeply the beauty of the scene, and all the objects round seemed to speak to me of their inner meaning, but my companion was not at all moved by, nor interested in her surroundings. She helped to make the picture more strange and lovely as she sat by me on a rock, with her shining clothes and brilliant face under the gay sunshade, but mentally she jarred on me by her complete indifference to any influence of the scene. I almost wished I were alone here, to sit upon this tremendous shore and dream.

"You are dull, Treevor," she exclaimed pettishly. "You really are."

I had kissed her twice in the last ten minutes, but she hated my eyes to wander for a moment from her face to the sea. She hated the least reference apparently to the landscape. As long as I was talking to her and about her, admiring her dress or her hair, she was satisfied.

"Come along," she said impatiently; "let us go on to the wood, leave off looking at that stupid sea."

I rose reluctantly and we followed the road which turned inland again. The wood was a world of grey shadows. As we entered by a narrow trail leading from the road, the golden day outside was soon closed from us by the thick veils of hanging creeper and parasitical plants of all sorts that entwined round the gnarled and aged trees, and crossing and re-crossing from one to the other, netted them together.

Over the creepers again had grown grey-green lichens and long, shaggy moss, so that strands and fringes of it fell on every side, filling the interstices of the gigantic web that stretched from tree to tree, excluding the light of the sunlit sky.

Beneath, the lower branches of the trees were sad and sodden, overgrown with lichen, clogged with hanging wreaths of moss. A river ran through the wood and at times, swelled by the melting snows, burst, evidently, in roaring flood over its banks.

Everywhere there were traces of recent floods, roots washed bare and places where the swirling waters had heaped up their débris of sticks and mud-stained leaves. All along the damp ground the lowest branches of the trees, weighted with tangled moss, trailed, broken and bruised by the fierce rush of the current. The trees themselves seemed centuries old, bent and gnarled and twisted into grotesque and ghostly forms. In the dim twilight reigning here one could fancy one stood in some hideous torture-chamber, surrounded by writhing and distorted figures. There an elbow, there a withered arm, a fist clenched in agony, seemed protruding from the sombre, sad-clothed trees, so weirdly knotted and twisted were the old cinder-hued boughs.

As we neared the river we could hear it rushing by long before we could see it, so thick was the undergrowth that hung low over it.

It seemed as if we might be approaching the black Styx through this melancholy wood where all seemed weeping in torn veils and ash-coloured garments.

No touch of depression affected my companion; she seemed as insensible to the grey solemnity, the dim mystery of the wood, as she had been to the vivid glory of the sea. She slipped a little velvet hand into mine, and when we drew near to the hidden Styx, murmured softly:

"We will find a dry place, Treevor, on the other side, and sit down among the trees. Then you must take me in your arms and I will be your own Suzee. I do not want my old husband any more."

I stopped and looked down upon her. Not even the sad light could dim the soft brilliance of her face. It seemed to bloom out of the ashy shadows like an exquisite flower. Her eyes were wells of fire beneath their velvet blackness.

"Do you love me very much?" I asked.

"Oh, yes, so much," she answered with passionate emphasis. "You are so beautiful. Never have I seen any one so beautiful, and so tall and so strong. Oh, it is pain to me to love you so much."

And indeed she became quite white, as she drew her hand from mine and clasped both of hers upon her breast as if to still some agony there.

My own heart beat hard. The grey wood seemed to lose its ashy tone and become warm and rosy round us. I bent over her and took her up wholly in my arms, and she laughed and threw hers around me in wild delight.

"Carry me, Treevor, over the bridge and up the slope at the side. It is so nice to feel you carrying me."

It was no difficulty to carry her, and the waves of electricity from her joyous little soul rushed through me till my arms and all the veins of my body seemed alight and burning.

I ran with her, over the narrow bridge and up the slope, where, as she said, there was drier ground. And there, on a bed of leaves under some tangled branches, I fell on my knees with her still clasped to my breast, and covered her small satin-skinned face with kisses.

"I am yours now. You must not let me go. I only want to look and look at your face. I wish I could tell you how I love you. Oh, Treevor, I can't tell you…."

As I looked down, breathless with running and kisses and the fires she had kindled within me, I saw how her bosom heaved beneath the yellow jacket, how all the delicate curves of her breast seemed broken up with panting sighs and longing to express in words all that her body expressed so much better.

"Darling, there is no need to tell me. I know." And I put my hand round her soft column of throat, feeling all its quick pulses throbbing hard into the palm of my hand.

"Put your head down on my heart, Treevor. Lie down beside me; now let us think we have drunk a little opium, just a little, and we are going to sleep through a long night together. Hush! What is that? Did you hear anything?"

She lifted my hand from her throat and sat up, listening.

I had not heard anything. I had been too absorbed. All had vanished now from me, except the fervent beauty of the girl before me.

The sea of desire had closed over my head, sealing the senses to outside things; I drew her towards me impatiently.

"It is nothing," I murmured. "I heard nothing." But she sat up, gazing straight across a small cleared space in front of us to where the impenetrable thicket of undergrowth again stood forward like grey screens between the twisted tree trunks.

"Yes, there was something; there, opposite! Look, something is moving!" I followed her eyes and saw a strand of loose moss quiver and heard a twig break in the quiet round us. We both watched the undergrowth across the open space intently. For a second nothing moved, then the boughs parted in front of us, and through the great lichen streamers and rugged bands of grey-green moss depending from them, peered an old, drawn-looking face.

Suzee gave a piercing shriek of dismay, and started to her feet.

"My husband!" she gasped.

I sprang to my feet, and my right hand went to my hip pocket. The head pushed through the thicket, and a bent and aged form followed slowly. I drew out my revolver, but the figure of the old man straightened itself up and he waved his hand impatiently, as if deprecating violence.

"Sir, I have come after my wife," he said, in a low, broken tone.

I slipped the weapon back in my pocket. I had had an idea that he might attack Suzee, but voice and face showed he was in a different mood.

Suzee clung to my hand on her knees, crying and trembling.

"Go and sit over there," he said peremptorily to her, pointing to the other side of the glade, far enough from us to be out of hearing.

She did not move, only clung and shivered and wept as before.

I bent over her, loosening my hand.

"Do as he says," I whispered; "no harm can come to you while I am here."

Suzee let go my fingers reluctantly and crept away, sobbing, to the opposite edge of the thicket. The old Chinaman motioned me to sit down. I did so, mechanically wondering whether his calmness was a ruse under cover of which he would suddenly stab me. He sat down, too, stiffly, beside me, resting on his heels, and his hard, wrinkled hands supporting his withered face.

"Now," he said, in a thin old voice; "look at me! I am an old man, you are a young one. You are strong, you are well; you are rich too, I think." He looked critically over me. "You have everything that I have not, already. Why do you come here to rob an old man of all he has in this world?"

I felt myself colour with anger. All the blood in my body seemed to rush to my head and stand singing in my ears.

I felt a furious impulse to knock him aside out of my way; but his age and weakness held me motionless.

"All my youth, when I was strong and good-looking as you are now, and women loved me, I worked hard like a slave, and starved and saved. When others played I toiled, when they spent I hoarded up. What was I saving for? That I might buy myself that." He waved his hand in the direction of Suzee, sitting in a little crumpled heap against a gnarled tree opposite us.

"I bought her," he went on with increasing excitement. "I bought her from a woman who would have let her out, night by night, to foreigners. I have given her a good home, she does no hard work. She has a child, she has fine clothes. I work still all day and every day that I may give money to her. She is my one joy, my treasure; don't take her away from me, don't do it. You have all the world before you, and all the women in it that are without husbands. Go to them, leave me my wife in peace."

Tears were rolling fast down his face now, his clasped hands quivered with emotion.

"When I was a young man I would not take any pleasure. No, pleasure means money, and I was saving. When I am old I will buy, I said. It needs money, when I am old I shall have it. I can buy then. But, ah! when one is old it is all dust and ashes."

I looked at his thin shrunken form, poorly clad, at his face, deeply lined with great furrows, made there by incessant toil and constant pain. I felt my joy in Suzee to wither in the grey shadow of his grief. Some people would have thought him doubtless an immoral old scoundrel, and that he had no business in his old age to try to be happy as younger men are, to wish, to expect it. But I cannot see that joy is the exclusive right of any particular age. A young man or young woman has no more right or title to enjoy than an old man or woman; they have simply the right of might, which is no right at all.

"Well, what do you want me to say or do?" I exclaimed impatiently. "Take your wife back with you now, no harm has happened to her. Take her home with you."

"Yes, I can take her body, but not her spirit," answered the old man sadly.

His tone made me look at him keenly. Hitherto I had felt sorry for Suzee that she was his; now, as I heard his accent, I felt sorry for him that he was hers.

A great capacity for suffering looked out of the aged face, such as I knew could never look out of hers.

"If you lift your finger she would come to you! Promise me you will not see her again, not speak to her; that you will go. And if she comes to you, you will not accept her."

I was silent for a moment.

"My ship goes to-morrow morning," I answered; "I am not likely to see your wife again. I shall not seek her."

"That is not enough," moaned the old man; "she will find a way. She will come to you. Promise me you will not take her away with you; if you do you will have an old man's murder on your head."

I moved impatiently.

"I am not going to take her away," I answered.

"But promise me. If I have your promise I shall feel certain."

I hesitated, and looked across at Suzee, a patch of beautiful colour against the grey background of bent and aged trees.

What had I intended to do, I asked myself. I could not take her, in any case. I had not meant that. A virtuous American ship like the Cottage City would hardly admit a Suzee to share my cabin.

Then what did my promise matter if it but reflected the fact, and if it satisfied him?

"You are not willing to promise," he said, coming close to me and peering into my face; "I feel it."

I thought I heard his teeth close on an unuttered oath. Still he did not threaten me. As I remained silent he suddenly threw himself on the ground in front of me, and stretched out his hands and put them on my feet.

"Sir I implore you. Give me your word you will not take her, then I am satisfied. Better take my life than my wife."

I lifted my eyes for a moment in a glance towards Suzee and saw her make a scornful gesture at the prostrate figure. The gold bracelets on her arm below the yellow silk sleeve shewed in the action a contrast to the old, worn clothing of the poorest material that her husband wore.

I rose to my feet and raised him up.

"Get up, I hate to see you kneel to me. I have said I shall not take your wife. As far as I am concerned, that is a promise. I have said it."

"Thank you," he said, inclining his head, and then moved away, not without a certain dignity in his old form, lean and twisted though the work of years had made it.

I dropped back into my place where I had been sitting and watched the two figures before me almost in a dream.

He went up to the girl and spoke, apparently not unkindly, and some talk ensued. Then I saw him bend down and take her wrist and drag her to her feet.

Suzee hung back as one sees a child hang back from a nurse, but she moved forward though unwillingly, and so at last they passed from my sight, through the grey trees and the weeping moss, the thin old man stepping doggedly forward, the pretty, gay-clothed childish little figure dragging back.

Then all was still. The old grey wood was full of weird light, but the silence of the night had fallen on it. Beast and bird and insect had sought their lair and nest and cranny. Not a leaf moved. I felt entirely alone.

"One never knows in life," I thought, repeating my words to Morley.

I felt a keen sense of longing regret surge slowly, heavily through me. How exquisitely sweet and perfect her beauty was! And she had lain in my arms for that moment, one moment that was stamped into my brain in gold. I put my head into my hands and shut out the dim grey wood from vision and recalled that moment. It came back to me, the touch of her soft form, the smiling curve of the lips put up to me, the fire in the liquid depths of those almond eyes, the round throat delicate as polished ivory. The extraordinary triumph of beauty over the senses came before my mind suddenly, presenting the problem that always puzzles and eludes me.

Why should certain lines and colours in pleasing the eye so intoxicate and inflame the brain? For it is the brain to which beauty appeals. Youth and health in a loved object are sufficient to capture the physical senses, but they do not fill the brain with that exaltation, that delirium of joy, that divine elation that sweeps up through us at the sight of beauty. Divine fire, it seems to be lighted first in the glance of the eyes.

In an hour's time I left the wood and walked slowly shipwards. I felt tired and overstrained, exceedingly regretful, full of longing after that lovely vision that had come to me and that I had had to drive away.

The unearthly stillness combined with the brilliant, unabated, unfailing light had a curious mystery about it that charmed and delighted me. The sea, so blue and tranquil, sparkled softly on my left hand, the pellucid blue of the sky stretched overhead, and all the air was full of the sweet sunshine we associate with day. Yet it was midnight. I pulled out my watch and looked at it to assure myself of the fact. Sitka was wrapt in silence and sleep, my own footstep resounded strangely in the burning empty streets.

I had to pass the tea-shop on my way to the ship. One could see nothing of it from the street as the compound shut it off from view, and across the compound entrance a stout hurdle was now stretched and barred.

I passed on with a sigh, reached the ship lying motionless against the quay, went down to my cabin without encountering any one, threw off my clothes and myself in my berth, feeling a sense of fatigue obliterating thought.

The night before I had had no sleep, and the incessant golden glare, day and night alike, wearies the nerves not trained to it.

Suzee and almond eyes and injured husbands floated away from me on the dark wings of sleep.

It must have been an hour or so later that I woke suddenly with a sense of suffocation. Some soft, heavy thing lay across my breast. I started up and two arms clasped my neck and I heard Suzee's voice; saying in my ear:

"Treevor, dear Treevor, I have found you! Now I you will take me away, and we will stay for ever and ever together. I am so happy."

The cabin was full of the same steady yellow light as when I closed my eyes. Looking up I saw her sweet oval face above me.

She was lying on the berth leaning over me, supported on her elbows.

As I looked up she pressed her lips down on my face, kissing me on the eyes and mouth with passionate repetition and insistence.

"Dear little girl, dear little Suzee!" I answered, putting up my arms and folding them round her.

I was only half-awake, and for a moment the old Chinaman was forgotten. It was all rather like a delicious dream.

"I am quite, quite happy now," she said, laying down her head on my chest. "Oh, so happy, Treevor; you must never let me go. I love you so, like this," she added, putting her two hands round my throat, "when I can feel your neck and when you are sleeping. You looked beautiful, just now, when I found you. I am sorry you woke."

Clear consciousness was struggling back now with memory, but not before I had pressed her to me and returned those kisses. She had laid aside her little saffron silk coat, and her breast and arms shone softly through a filmy muslin covering.

I sat up regarding her; very lissom and soft and lovely she looked, and my whole brain swam suddenly with delight.

Surely I could not part with her! She was precious to me in that madness that comes over us at such moments.

I put my arms round her and held her to my breast with all my force in a clasp that must have been painful to her, but she only laughed delightedly.

Then my promise came back to me. It was impossible to break that. What was the good of torturing myself when I had made it impossible to take her. Why had she come here?

"Where is your husband?" I asked mechanically wondering if any strange fate had removed him from between us.

"Oh, I put him to sleep, he will give no trouble. I gave him opium, so much opium, he will sleep a long time."

"You have not killed him?" I said, in a sudden horror.

Her eyes were wide open and full of extraordinary fire, she seemed in those moments capable of anything.

She put up her little hands and ran them through my hair.

"Such black hair," she murmured. "Ah, how I love it! I love black hair. How it shines, how soft it is! I hate grey hair. It is horrid. No, I have not killed him. He will wake again when we have sailed and are far away from Sitka."

These words drove from me the last veil of clinging sleep. I kept my arms round her and said:

"But, Suzee, I can't take you with me. I promised your husband to-night I would not."

"That's nothing," she replied lightly; "promises are nothing when one loves. And you love me, Treevor; you must love me, and I am coming with you, you can't drive me away."

The ship's bells sounded overhead on deck as she spoke. The sound seemed a warning. I knew our ship was due to leave in the morning; I did not know quite when. If it left the quay with the girl on board, the horror of a broken promise would cling to me all my life.

"I can't take you, it is impossible. You must go back and try to forget you have ever seen me. You must go now at once, our ship is leaving soon."

"I know," said Suzee tranquilly; "and I shall be so happy when it starts."

I pushed her aside and got up from the berth. The cabin window stood wide open. In the position the ship was it was easy to come in and out through it from the quay. She must have entered that way.

"You must go," I said between my teeth. I was afraid of myself. Overhead I heard movements and clanking chains and shuffling feet. Our ship was leaving, and she was still on board with me.

"Go out of that window now, instantly, or I shall put you out."

"You will not, Treevor," beginning to cry; "you won't be so unkind. I only want to stay with you; let me stay."

She was half-sitting on the edge of my berth, clinging to it with both hands. She was pale with an ivory pallor, her breasts rose in sobs under the transparent muslin of her vest.

The ship gave a great heave under our feet.

The blood beat so in my head and round my eyes I could hardly see her. I moved to her, clinging to one blind object. I bent over her and lifted her up. She was like a doll in weight. She was nothing to me.

As she realised my intention she seemed to turn into a wild animal in my arms. She bit and tore at my wrists, and scratched my face with her long sharp nails.

The ship was moving now and I was desperate.

I walked with her to the window and put her feet over the ledge.

We neither of us spoke a word. She clung to my neck so I thought she must overbalance me and drag me through with her.

With all my force I pushed her outwards and away from me. Her hands broke from my neck and scratched down my face till the blood ran from it.

"Don't struggle so," I warned her; "you will drop into the sea if you do." For a blue crack opened already between the moving ship and the quay.

Words were useless. She bit and struggled and clung to me like a cat mad with fear and rage.

With an effort I leant forward and half threw, half dropped her on the woodwork. She fell there with a gasping cry, and I drew the window to and shut it.

The ship rose and fell now and the blue water gleamed in an ever-widening track between its side and the quay.

I leant against the window glass and watched her through it. She had struggled to her knees and now knelt there weeping and stretching out little ivory tinted hands to the departing ship. My own eyes were full, and only through a mist could I see her kneeling there, a brilliant spot of colour in dazzling light on the deserted quay.

I turned away at last as we struck out on the open water. There, on my berth, facing me as I stumbled back to it, lay a little yellow jacket.

I threw myself upon it and put my hand over my eyes, while the ship made out beyond the fairy islands. And the gold night passed over and melted into the new day.

PART TWO

THE VIOLET NIGHT

CHAPTER IV

AT THE STUDIO

I was back in London again, back in my studio with the dull grey light of the city falling through the windows, and all the vivid glory, the matchless splendour of the North lay like a past dream in the background of my memory. But still how clear the dream, how bright each moment of it, and how long to my retrospective vision! Was it possible I had only been there three or four months? It seemed like as many years. For time has this peculiarity, that joy and action shorten it while it is passing, but lengthen it when it is past. A week in which we have done nothing of note, but spent in stationary idleness, how long and tedious it seems, yet in looking back upon it, it appears short as a day; while a week in which we have travelled far, seen several cities and been glad in each, though the gilded moments have danced by on lightning feet, when we look back upon that week it seems as if we have lived a year.

It was there, bright, radiant in my mind, the picture of those blue days and golden northern nights, and how the light of the picture seemed to gather round, and centre in a sweet youthful face with the blue stone earrings, hanging against the creamy neck, beside the rounded cheek, and the cluster of red flowers bound on each temple against the smooth black hair!

I settled myself lower in the deep roomy armchair, and pushed my feet forward to the blazing fire. There was still half an hour before I could decently ring for tea, and it was too dark already to work. I had had a hard and disagreeable morning, too, and felt I needed rest and quiet thought. How the red flame leapt in the grate, and what a rich, warm, wine-dark colour it threw all round my red room! I rose and drew the heavy crimson curtains across the windows to shut out their steely patches of grey that spoiled the harmony of colour. I returned to my chair and glanced round with satisfaction. Fitted and furnished and hung with every beautiful shade of red, my studio always delighted and charmed my vision.

My friends said I had papered and furnished it in red to throw up the white limbs and contours of my models, and this had something to do with it, for hardly any colour shows off white flesh to better advantage, though pale blue in this matter runs it close; but this was not the prompting motive. Rather it was that in England where all is so cold and tame and grey, from morals to colours, I liked to surround myself with this glowing barbaric crimson, this warm inviting tint.

My eye in wandering from floor to ceiling rested finally on the empty easel, the numerous white unused sheets of paper near it. I felt in despair. Not even a sketch of a Phryne yet! Not even a model found! Not even the idea of where to find one!

I had been seeing models all the morning, and how wearisome and vexatious, and even, towards the end, how repulsive that becomes! The wearying search after something that corresponds to the perfect ideal in one's brain, the constant raising of hope and ensuing disappointment as a misshapen foot or crooked knee destroys the effect of neck and shoulder, produce at last an intolerable irritation. I had dismissed them all finally, and they had trailed away in the rain, a dismal procession of dark-clothed women.

A quarter of an hour of red stillness in that comfortable room had passed, and the warmth and quiet of it had crept over me and into me, gradually soothing away all vexations, when a knock came on the door and in answer to my, "Come in," some one entered the room behind me.

"I am so glad to find you."

I started to my feet at the sound of the soft voice, and went forward to the door.

"Viola! how good of you to come." I took both her hands and drew her into the firelight which sparkled gratefully on her tall slender figure and the fair waves of hair under her velvet hat.

"May I stay and have tea with you? I have shopping all the afternoon and as I was driving past I thought I would see if you were in and disengaged."

"I shall be delighted," I said as I wheeled another armchair up to the fire.

"You are sure? You have nothing else to do?"

"Nothing, really nothing," I said, walking to the electric lights and switching them on; "and if I had, I would leave it all to have tea with you."

She laughed, such a pretty dainty laugh! What a contrast to the rough giggles amongst the models this morning!

"Trevor! you are just the same as ever; all compliments. But I am immensely glad you are not going to turn me out, for I am chilly and tired and want my tea and a talk with you very badly." And she settled down in her large chair with a sigh of content.

I came back to the hearth and stood looking down upon her. The light was rose-coloured, falling through tinted globes, and soft as the firelight. She looked exquisite, and she must have seen the admiration in my eyes for she coloured under them.

She was wearing a dark green velvet gown edged fur and which fitted her lovely figure closely, being perhaps designed to display it.

"You have come like a glorious sunset to a gloomy day," I said. "I have had a horrid morning and been depressed all the afternoon."

"You have no inspiration, then, yet for the Phryne?" she answered, glancing round; "otherwise you would be in the seventh heaven."

"No," I groaned, "and the models are so dreadful; so far from giving one an inspiration, they would kill any one had. All last week I was trying to find a model, and all this morning again. I would give anything for a good one."

She murmured a sympathetic assent, and I went on, pursuing my own thoughts freely, for Viola was my cousin and no one else knew or understood me so well as she did. We had grown up together, and always talked on all sorts of subjects to each other.

"The difficulty is with most of these English models, they are so thick and heavy, so cart-horsey, or else they are so thin. The tall, graceful ones are too thin, I want those subtle, gracious lines, but I don't want sharp bones and corners. I want smooth, rounded contours, and yet the outlines to be delicate; I want slender grace and suppleness with roundness…."

I stopped suddenly, the blood mounting to my forehead. I was looking down at her as she lay back in the chair. She looked at me, and our gaze got locked together. A thought had sprung suddenly between us. I realised all at once I was describing the figure before me, realised that I was face to face with the most perfect, enchanting model of my dearest dreams.

There was a swift rush of red to her face, too, as I stopped. Up till then she had been quietly listening. But she saw my thought then. It was visible to both of us and for a moment a deadly silence dropped on us. Of course, I ought not to have stopped, but the thought came to me with such a blinding flash of sudden revelation that it paralysed me and took speech from my lips. Just in that moment the door opened and tea was brought in. I turned my attention immediately to making it, and what with asking her how much sugar she would have and pressing her to take hot toast and crumpets, the cloud of embarrassment passed and all was light and easy again. I dismissed the idea instantly, and we did not speak of the picture. I questioned her about her shopping, we recalled the last night's dance where we had been together, and spoke of a hundred other light matters in which we had common interests. Then a silence stole over us, and Viola sank far back in her chair, gazing with absent eyes into the fire.

Suddenly she sat up and turned to me. I saw her heart must be beating fast, for her face and lips had grown quite white.

"Trevor, I wish you would let me be your model for the Phryne."

Almost immediately she had spoken the colour rushed in a burning stream across her face, forcing the tears to her eyes. I saw them brim up, sparkling to the lids, in the firelight.

I sat up in my chair, leaning forwards towards her. My own heart seemed to rise with a leap into my throat.

"Dearest! I could not think of such a thing! It is so good of you, but…."

I stopped. She had sunk back in her chair. She was looking away from me. I saw the tears well up over the lids and roll slowly unchecked down her face.

"I should so like to be of use to you," she murmured in a low tone, "and I think I could be in that way, immense use."

I slid to my knees beside her chair, and took the slim, delicate white hand that hung over the arm in mine and pressed it, very greatly moved and hardly knowing what to answer her.

"I shall never forget you have offered it, never cease to be grateful, but…."

"There is no question of being grateful," she broke in gently, "unless it were on my side. I should think it an honour to be made part of your work, to live for ever in it, or at least much longer than in mortal life. What is one's body? It is nothing, it perishes so soon, but what you create will last for centuries at least."

I pressed my lips to her hand in silence. I felt overwhelmed by the suggestion, by the unselfishness, by the grandeur of it. I saw that the proposition stood before her mind in a totally different light from that in which it would present itself to most women. But, then, the outlook of an artist upon life and all the things in life is entirely different from that of the ordinary person. It takes in the wide horizon, it embraces a universe, and not a world, it sweeps up to the large ideals, the abstract form of things, passing over the concrete and the actual which to ordinary minds make up the all they see.

And Viola was an artist: she expressed herself in music as I did in painting. Our temperaments were alike though our gifts were different, and we served the same mystical Goddess though our appointments in her temple were not the same.

As an artist the idea was, to me, simple enough, as a man it horrified me.

"I could not allow it."

She turned upon me.

"Why?" she said simply.

"Well, because … because it is too great a sacrifice."

"I have said it is no sacrifice. It is an honour."

"It would injure you if it became known."

"It will not become known."

"Everything becomes known."

"Well, I shouldn't care if it did."

"By and by you might regret it. It might stand in the way of your marrying some one you loved."

"I don't believe I shall ever want to marry. Do I look like a domestic person? In any case, I am quite sure I shouldn't want to marry a man if he objected to my being a model for a great picture to my own cousin. Why, Trevor, we are part of each other, as it were. I am like your own sister. What can it matter? While you are painting me I shall be nothing, the picture will be everything. I am no more than a dream or vision which might come before you, and you will give me life, immortality on your canvas. As an old woman when all beauty has gone from me, I shall be there alive, young, beautiful still."

"It is all sophistry, dearest, I can't do it."

"You will when you have thought it all over," she said softly, "at least if you think I should do—are you sure of that?"

She rose and stood for a moment, one hand outstretched towards the mantelpiece, and resting there for support. The velvet gown clung to her, and almost every line of her form could be followed with the eye or divined. The throat was long, round, and full, the fall of the shoulder and the way its lines melted into the curves of the breast had the very intoxication of beauty in them, the waist was low, slender, and perfect, the main line to the knee and on to the ankle absolutely straight. To my practised eyes the clothing had little concealment. I knew that here was all that I wanted.

"I am supposed to have a very perfect figure," she said with a faint smile, "and it seems rather a pity to use it so little. To let it be of service to you, to give you just what you want, to create a great picture, to save you all further worry over it, which is quite knocking you up, would be a great happiness to me."

She paused. I said nothing.

"I do not think I must stay any longer," she said glancing at my clock, "nor shall I persuade you any more. I leave it entirely in your hands. Write to me if you want me to come. Perhaps you may find another model."

She smiled up at me. Her face had a curious delicate beauty hard to define. The beauty of a very transparent skin and sapphire eyes.

I bent over her and kissed her bright scarlet lips.

"Dearest! if you only knew how I appreciate all you have said, how good I think it of you! And I could never find a lovelier model; you know it is not that thought which influences me, but it is impossible. You must not think of it."

"Very well," she said with a laugh in her lovely eyes, "but you will!"

She disengaged herself from me, picked up a fur necklet from her chair, and went to the door.

"Good-night," she said softly, and went out.

Left to myself, I walked restlessly up and down the room. She was right. I could think of nothing but her words to me, and how her visit had changed my mood and all the atmosphere about me! It seemed as if she had filled it with electricity. My pulses were all beating hard. The quiet of the studio was intolerable. I was dining out that evening, and then going on to a dance. I would dress now a little early and then go to the club and spend the intermediate time there.

My bedroom opened out of the studio by a small door, before which I generally had a red and gold Japanese screen. I went in and switched on the light and began to dress, trying to get away from my crowding thoughts.

The temptation to accept Viola's suggestion was the greater because she was so absolutely free and mistress of her own actions.

If she chose of her own free will to do any particular thing there was practically no one else to be consulted and no one to trouble her with reproof or reproaches.

Early left an orphan and in possession of a small fortune in her own right, she had been brought up by an old aunt who simply worshipped her and never questioned nor allowed to be questioned anything which Viola did.

She had given her niece an elaborate education, believing that a girl's mental training should be as severe as a boy's, and Viola knew her Greek and Latin and mathematics better than I knew mine, though all these had lately given way to the study of music, for which she had a great and peculiar gift.

The old lady was delighted when she found her favourite niece was really one of the children of the gods, as she put it, and henceforth Viola's life was left still more unrestrained.

"She has genius, Trevor," she would say to me, "just as you have, and we ordinary people can't profess to guide or control those who in reality are so much greater than we are. I leave Viola to judge for herself about life, I always have since she was quite a little thing, and I have no fear for her. Whatever she does I know it will always be right."

Viola was just twenty, but this kind of training had given her an intelligence and developed her intellect far beyond her years.

In her outlook upon life she was more like a man than a woman, and, never having been to school nor mixed much with other girls of her own age, she was free from all those small, petty habits of mind, that littleness of mental vision that so mars and dwarfs the ordinary feminine character.

In this question of posing for the picture, to take her face also would, of course, be quite impossible, but I had my own ideal for the Phryne's face, nor was that important.

That the figure should be something of unusual beauty, something peculiarly distinctive seemed to me a necessity. For the form of the Grecian Phryne had, by the mere force of its perfect and triumphant beauty, swept away the reason of all that circle of grey-bearded hostile judges called upon to condemn it, had carved for itself a place in history for ever. There should in its presentment be something peculiarly arresting and enchanting, or the artistic idea, the spirit of the picture, would be lost.

The next morning I interviewed models again, and so strange is the human mind that while I honestly tried to find one that suited me, tried to be satisfied, I was full of feverish apprehension that I might do so, and when I had seen the last and could with perfect honesty reject her, I felt a rush of extraordinary elation all through me. I knew, and told myself so, every half second, that Viola's temptation was one I ought to and must resist, and yet the idea of yielding filled me with a wild instinctive delight that no reason could suppress. Yes, because once an artist has seen or conceived by his own imagination his perfect ideal, nothing else, nothing short of this will satisfy him. If it was difficult for me to find a model before, it was practically impossible to do so now. For, having once realised what it wanted, the mind impatiently rejected everything else, though it might possibly have accepted something less than its desire before that realisation of it.

These models were all well-formed women, but they were commonplace. The hold Viola's form had upon the eye was that it was not commonplace. Its beauty was distinctive, peculiar, arresting. I was not a painter of types, but of exceptions. The common things of life are not interesting, nor do I think they are worthy subjects for Art to concern itself with. Something unusually beautiful, transcending the common type, is surely the best for the artist to try to perpetuate.

Friday came, the end of the week, and I was still without a model. My nights had been nearly sleepless, and my days full of feverish anxiety: an active anxiety to accept another sitter and withstand the temptation of Viola, which fought desperately with the more passive anxiety not to be satisfied and to be obliged to yield. Between these two I had grown thin, as they fought within me, tearing me in the struggle.

To-day, Friday, the war was over. I had sent a note to Viola asking her to have tea with me. If she came, if she still held to her wish, I should accept, and the Phryne was assured. How my heart leapt at the thought! Those last hours before an artist gives the first concrete form to the brain children of his intangible dreams, how full of a double life he seems! I was back from lunch and in the studio early; I could not tell when she might come, and I closed all the windows and made up the fire till the room seemed like a hot-house. I arranged a dais with screens of flaming colour behind it reflecting the red rays of the fire.

If she consented, she should stand here after having changed into the Greek dress. And as the moment chosen for the picture was that in which Phryne is unveiling herself before her judges, I intended to let her discard the drapery as she liked. I should not attempt to pose her; I would not even direct her; I should simply watch her, and at some moment during the unveiling she would fall naturally into just the pose—some pose—I did not know myself yet which might give me my inspiration—that I wished. Then I would arrest her, ask her to remain in it. I thought so we should arrive nearest to the effect of that famous scene of long ago.

The dress I had chosen was of a dull red tint, not unlike that of Leighton's picture, but I had no fear of seeming to copy Leighton. What true artist ever fears he may be considered a copyist? He knows the strength and vitality of his conception will need no spokesman when it appears.

I felt frightfully restless and excited, a mad longing filled me to get the first sketch on paper. I hardly thought of Viola as Viola or my cousin then. She was already the Phryne of Athens for me, but when suddenly a light knock came on the door outside my heart seemed to stand still and I could hardly find voice to say, "Come in." When she entered, dressed in her modern clothes and hat, and held out her hand, all the modern, mundane atmosphere came back and brought confusion with it.

"You said come early, so here I am," she said lightly. "Trevor," she added, gazing at me closely, "you are looking awfully handsome, but so white and ill. What is the matter?"

"I have been utterly wretched about the picture. I know I ought not to accept your offer, but the temptation is too great. If you feel the same as you did about it, I am going to ask you to pose for me this afternoon."

"I do feel just the same, Trevor," she answered earnestly. "You can't think how happy and proud I am to be of use to you."

"You know what the picture is?" I asked her, holding her two hands and looking down into the great eyes raised confidently to mine.

"I want you to dress in all those red draperies, and then, standing on the dais, to drop them, let them fall from you."

"Yes, I think I know exactly. I will try, and, if I don't do it rightly, you must tell me and we must begin again."

She took off her hat and cloak and gloves. Then she turned to me and asked for the dress. I gave it to her and showed her how it fastened and unfastened with a clasp on the shoulder.

She listened quietly to my directions, then, gathering up all the thin drapery, walked to the screen and disappeared from my view.

I sat down waiting. A great nervous tension held me. I had ceased to think of the right or wrong of my action. I was too absorbed now in the thought of the picture to be conscious of anything else.

When she came from behind the screen clothed in the red Athenian draperies her face was quite white, but composed and calm. She did not look at me, but walked to the platform at once. I had withdrawn to a chair as far from it as was practicable, divining that the nearer I was the more my presence would weigh upon her. She faced me now on the dais, and very slowly began to unfasten the buckle on her shoulder. I sat watching her intently, hardly breathing, waiting for the moment.

She was to me nothing now but the Phryne, and I was nothing but a pencil held in the hand of Art.

The first folds of crimson fell, disclosing her throat and shoulders, the others followed, piling softly one on the other to her waist, where they stayed held by her girdle. The shoulders and breasts were revealed exquisite, gleaming white against the dull glow of the crimson stuff. I waited. It was a lovely, entrancing vision but I waited. She lowered her hand from her shoulder and brought it to her waist, firmly and without hesitation she unclasped the belt, and then taking the sides of it, one in each hand, with its enclosed drapery, which parted easily in the centre, she made a half step forwards to free herself from it, and stood revealed from head to foot. It was the moment. Her head thrown up, with her eyes fixed far above me, her throat and the perfect breast thrown outwards and forwards, the slight bend at the slim waist accentuating the round curves of the hips, one straight limb with the delicate foot advanced just before the other, the arms round, beautifully moulded, held tense at her sides, as the hands clutched tightly the falling folds behind her, these made up the physical pose, and the pride, the tense nervousness, the defiance of her own feelings gave its meaning expression. I raised my hand and called to her to pause just so, to be still, if she could, without stirring.

She quivered all through her frame at the sudden shock of hearing my voice; then stood rigid. I had my paper ready, and began to sketch rapidly.

How beautiful she was! In all my experience, in the whole of my career, I had never had such a model. The skin was a marvellous whiteness: there seemed no brown, red, or yellow shades upon it; nor any of that mottled soap appearance that ruins so many models. She was white, with the warm, true dazzling whiteness of the perfect blonde.

My head burned: I felt that great wave of inspiration roll through me that lifts the artist to the feet of heaven. There is no happiness like it. No, not even the divine transports and triumph of love can equal it.

I sketched rapidly, every line fell on the paper as I wished it. The time flew. I felt nothing, knew nothing, but that the glorious image was growing, taking life under my hand. I was in a world of utter silence, alone with the spirit of divine beauty directing me, creating through me.

Suddenly, from a long distance it seemed, a little cry or exclamation came to me.

"Trevor, I must move!"

I started, dropped the paper, and rose.

The light had grown dim, the fire had burned hollow. Viola had dropped to her knees, and was for the moment a huddled blot of whiteness amongst the crimson tones. I advanced, filled with self-reproach for my selfish absorption. But she rose almost directly, wrapped in some of the muslin, and walked from the dais to the screen. I hesitated to follow her there, and went back to the fallen picture. I picked it up and gazed on it with rapture—how perfect it was! The best thing of a lifetime! Viola seemed so long behind the screen I grew anxious and walked over to it. As I came round it, she was just drawing on her bodice, her arms and neck were still bare. She motioned me back imperatively, and I saw the colour stream across her face. I retreated. It was absurd in a way, that blush as my eyes rested on her then, I who just now … and yet perfectly reasonable, understandable. Then she was the Phryne, a vision to me, as she had said, in ancient Athens. And now we were modern man and woman again. All that we do in this life takes its colour from our attitude of mind towards it, and but for her artist's mind, a girl like Viola could never have done what she had at all.

In a moment more she came from behind the screen. She looked white and cold, and came towards the fire shivering. I drew her into my arms, strained her against my breast, and kissed her over and over again in a passion of gratitude.

"How can I thank you! You have done for me what no one else could. I can never tell you what I feel about it."

She put her arms round my neck, and kissed me in return.

"Any one would do all they could for you, I think," she said softly. "You are so beautiful and so nice about things I am only too happy to have been of use to you."

"What a brute I was to have forgotten you were standing so long. Was it very bad? Were you cold?"

"At the end I was, but I shouldn't have moved for that. I got so cramped. I couldn't keep my limbs still any longer. I was sorry to be so stupid and have to disturb you."

"I can't think how you stood so well," I said remorsefully, "and so long. It is so different for a practised model."

"Well, I did practise keeping quite still in one position every day all this last week, but of course a week is not long."

I had pressed the bell, and tea was brought in. I busied myself with making it for her. She looked white and ill. I felt burning with a sense of elation, of delighted triumph. The picture was there. It glimmered a white patch against the chair a little way off. The idea was realised, the inspiration caught, all the rest was only a matter of time.

We drank our tea in silence. Viola looked away from me into the fire. She did not seem constrained or embarrassed. Having decided to do, as she had, and conquer her own feelings, she did so simply, grandly, in a way that suited the greatness of her nature. There was no mincing modesty, no self-conscious affectation. The agony of confusion that she had felt in that moment when she had stood before me with her hand on the clasp of her girdle, had been evident to me, but her pride forced her to crush it out of sight.

I went over to her low chair and sat down at her feet.

"Do you know you have shown me this afternoon something which I did not believe existed—an absolutely perfect body without a fault or flaw anywhere. I did not believe there could be anything so exquisitely beautiful."

She coloured, but a warm happy look came into her eyes as she gazed back at me.

"So I did really satisfy you? I realised your expectations?" she murmured. I lifted one of her hands to my lips and kissed it.

"Satisfied is not the word," I returned, looking up into the dark blue eyes above me with my own burning with admiration. "I was entranced. May I shew it to you?"

"Yes, I should like to see it," she answered.

I rose and brought over to her the picture and set it so that we both could see it together. She gazed at it some time in silence.

"Do you like it?" I asked suddenly with keen anxiety.

"You have idealised me, Trevor!"

"It is impossible to idealise what is in itself divine," I replied quietly. She looked at me, her face full Of colour but her eyes alight and smiling.

"I am so glad, so happy that you are pleased. You have drawn it magnificently. What life you put into your things—they live and breathe."

She turned and looked at my clock.

"I must go now, I have been here ages." She began to put on her hat and cloak. When I had fastened the latter round her throat, I took both her hands in mine.

"May I expect you to-morrow?"

"To-morrow? Let me see. Well, I was going to the Carrington's to lunch. I promised to go, so I must; but I need not stay long. I can leave at three and be here at half past; only that will be too late in any case on account of the light, won't it?"

"Not if it is a bright day."

"You see, I need not accept any more invitations. I shan't, if I am coming here, but I have one or two old engagements I must keep."

I dropped her hands and turned away.

"But I can't let you give up your amusements, your time for me in this way!" I said.

Viola laughed.

"It's not much to give up—a few luncheons and teas! As long as I have time for my music I will give you all the rest."

She stood drawing on her gloves, facing the fire; her large soft, fearless eyes met mine across the red light.

I stepped forwards towards her impulsively.

"What can I say? How can I thank you or express a hundredth part of my gratitude?"

Viola shook her head with her softest smile and a warm caressing light in her eyes.

"You look at it quite wrongly," she said lightly. "My reward is great enough, surely! You are giving me immortality."

Then she went out, and I was alone.

* * * * *

For a fortnight I was happy. Viola came regularly every day to the studio, and the picture grew rapidly, I was absorbed in it, lived for it, and had that strange peace and glowing content that Art bestows, and which like that other peace "passeth all understanding."

Then gradually a sense of unrest mingled with the calm. The whole afternoon while Viola was with me I worked happily, content to the point of being absolutely oblivious of everything except ourselves and the picture. Our tea together afterwards, when we discussed the progress made and the colour effects, was a delight. But the moment the door was closed after her, when she had left me, a blank seemed to spread round me. The picture itself could not console me. I gazed and gazed at it, but the gaze did not satisfy me nor soothe the feverish unrest. I longed for her presence beside me again.

One day after the posing she seemed so tired and exhausted that I begged her to lie down a little and drew up my great comfortable couch, like a Turkish divan, to the fire. She did as she was bid, and I heaped up a pile of blue cushions behind her fair head.

"I am so tired," she exclaimed and let her eyes close and her arms fall beside her.

I stood looking down on her. Her face was shell-like in its clear fairness and transparency, and the beautiful expressive eyebrows drawn delicately on the white forehead appealed to me.

The intimacy established between us, her complete willing sacrifice to me, her surrender, her trust in me, the knowledge of herself and her beauty she had allowed me gave birth suddenly in my heart to a great overwhelming tenderness and a necessity for its expression.

I bent over her, pressed my lips down on hers and held them there. She did not open her eyes, but raised her arms and put them round my neck, pressing me to her. In a joyous wave of emotion I threw myself beside her and drew the slender, supple figure into my arms.

"Trevor," she murmured, as soon as I would let her, "I am afraid you are falling in love with me."

"I have already," I answered. "I love you, I want for my own. You must marry me, and come and live at the studio."

"I don't think I can marry you," she replied in very soft tones, but she did not try to move from my clasp.

"Why not?"

"Artists should not marry: it prevents their development. How old are you?"

"Twenty-eight," I answered, half-submerged in the delight of the contact with her, of knowing her in my arms, hardly willing or able to listen to what she said.

"And how many women have you loved?"

"Oh, I don't know," I answered. "I have been with lots, of course, but
I don't think I have ever loved at all till now."

"What about the little girl in the tea-shop at Sitka?"

"I don't think I loved her. I wanted her as an experience."

"Is it not just the same with me?"

"No, it isn't. It's quite different. Do not worry me with questions,
Viola. Kiss me and tell me you love me."

She raised herself suddenly on one elbow and leant over me, kissing me on the eyes and lips, all over my face, with passionate intensity.

"I do love you. You are like my life to me, but I know I ought not to marry you. I should absorb you. You would love me. You would not want to be unfaithful to me. But fidelity to one person is madness an impossibility to an artist if he is to reach his highest development. It can't be. We must not think of it."

The blood went to my head in great waves. The supreme tenderness of a moment back seemed gone, her words had roused another phase of passion, the harsh fury of it.

"I don't care about the art, I don't care about anything. You shall marry me. I will make you love me."

"You don't understand. If you were fifty-eight I would marry you directly."

"You shall marry me before then," I answered, and kissed her again and put my hands up to her soft-haired head to pull it down to my breast and dragged loose some of its soft coils.

"Trevor, you are mad. Let me get up."

I rose myself, and left her free to get up. She sat up on the couch, white and trembling.

"Now you are going to say you won't come to me any more, I suppose?" I said angrily. The nervous excitement of the moment was so great; there was such a wild booming in my ears I could hardly hear my own voice.

She looked up. The tears welled into her luminous blue eyes.

"How unkind you are! and how unjust! Of course I shall come, must come every day if you want it till the Phryne is done. You don't know how I love you."

I took her dear little hand and kissed it.

"I am sorry," I said. "Forgive me, but you must not say such stupid things. Of course you will marry me; why, we are half married already. Most people would say we ought to be."

I turned on the lights and drew the table up to the fire, which I stirred, and began to make the tea.

Viola sat on the edge of the couch in silence, coiling up her hair.

She seemed very pale and tired, and I tried to soothe her with increased tenderness. I made her a cup of tea and came and sat beside her while she drank it. Then I put my arm round her waist and got her to lean against me, and put her soft fair-haired head down on my shoulder and rest there in silence.

I stroked one of her hands that lay cold and nerveless in her lap with my warm one.

"You have done so much for me," I said softly; "wonderful things which I can never forget, and now you must belong to me altogether. No two people could love each other more than we do. It would be absurd of us not to marry." I kissed her, and she accepted my caresses and did not argue with me any more; so I felt happier, and when she rose to leave our good-bye was very tender, our last kiss an ecstasy.

When she had gone I picked up one of the sketches I had first made of her and gazed long at it.

How extravagantly I had come to love her now. I realised in those moments how strong this passion was that had grown up, as it were, under cover of the work, and that I had not fully recognised till now.

How intensely the sight of these wonderful lines moved me! I felt that I could worship her, literally. That she had become to me as a religion is to the enthusiast.

I must be the possessor, the sole owner of her. I felt she was mine already. The agony and the loss, if she ever gave herself to another, would be unendurable. If that happened I should let a revolver end everything for me. I did not believe even the thought of my work would save me.

Yet how curious this same passion is, I reflected, gazing at the exquisite image on the paper before me. If one of these lines were bent out of shape, twisted, or crooked, this same passion would cease to be. The love and affection and esteem I had for her would remain, but this intense desire and longing for her to be my own property, which shook me now to the very depths of my system, would utterly vanish.

Yet it would be wrong to say that these lines alone had captured me, for had they enclosed a stupid or commonplace mind they would have stirred me as little as if they themselves had been imperfect.

No it is when we meet a Spirit that calls to us from within a form of outward beauty, and only then, that the greatest passion is born within us.

And that I felt for Viola now, and I knew—looking back through a vista of other and lighter loves—I had never known yet its equal. She loved me, too, that great fact was like a chord of triumphant music ringing through my heart. Then why this fancy that she would not marry me? How could I possibly break it down? persuade her of its folly?

I walked up and down the studio all that evening, unable to go out to dinner, unable to think of anything but her, and all through the night I tossed about, restless and sleepless, longing for the hour on the following day which should bring her to me again.

Yet how those hours tried me now! It would be impossible to continue. She must and should marry me. It was only for me she held back from it apparently, yet for me it would be everything.

One afternoon, after a long sitting, the power to work seemed to desert me suddenly. My throat closed nervously, my mouth grew dry, the whole room seemed swimming round me, and the faultless, dazzling figure before me seemed receding into a darkening mist. I flung away my brush and rose suddenly. I felt I must move, walk about, and I started to pace the room then suddenly reeled, and saved myself by clutching at the mantelpiece.

"What is it? What is the matter?" came Viola's voice, sharp with anxiety, across the room. "Are you ill? Shall I come to you?"

"No, no," I answered, and put my head down on the mantelpiece. "Go and dress. I can't work any more."

I heard her soft slight movements as she left the dais. I did not turn, but sank into the armchair beside me, my face covered by my hands.

Screens of colour passed before my eyes, my ears sang.

I had not moved when I felt her come over to me. I looked up, she was pale with anxiety.

"You are ill, Trevor! I am so sorry."

"I have worked a little too much, that's all," I said constrainedly, turning from her lovely anxious eyes.

"Have you time to stay with me this evening? We could go out and get some dinner, if you have, and then go on to a theatre. Would they miss you?"

"Not if I sent them a wire. I should like to stay with you. Are you better?"

I looked up and caught one of her hands between my own burning and trembling ones.

"I shall never be any better till I have you for my own, till we are married. Why are you so cruel to me?"

"Cruel to you? Is that possible?" Her face had crimsoned violently, then it paled again to stone colour.

"Well, don't let's discuss that. The picture's done. I can't work on it any more. It can't be helped. Let's go out and get some dinner, anyway."

Viola was silent, but I felt her glance of dismay at the only half-finished figure on the easel.

She put on her hat and coat in silence, and we went out. After we had ordered dinner and were seated before it at the restaurant table we found we could not eat it. We sat staring at one another across it, doing nothing.

"Did you really mean that … that you wouldn't finish the picture?" she said, after a long silence.

I looked back at her; the pale transparency of her skin, the blue of the eyes, the bright curls of her hair in the glow of the electric lamp, looked wonderfully delicate, entrancing, and held my gaze.

"I don't think I can. I have got to a point where I must get away from it and from you."

"But it is dreadful to leave it unfinished."

"It's better than going mad. Let's have some champagne. Perhaps that will give us an appetite."

Viola did not decline, and the wine had a good effect upon us.

We got through some part of our dinner and then took a hansom to the theatre. As we sat close, side by side, in one of the dark streets, I bent over her and whispered:

"If we had been married this morning, and you were coming back to the studio with me after the theatre I should be quite happy and I could finish the picture."

She said nothing, only seemed to quiver in silence, and looked away from me out of the window.

We took stalls and had very good seats, but what that play was like I never knew. I tried to keep my eyes on the stage, but it floated away from me in waves of light and colour. I was lost in wondering where I had better go to get fresh inspiration, to escape from the picture, from Viola, from myself. Away, I must get away. Coelum, non animum, mutant qui trans mare current is not always true. Our mind is but a chameleon and takes its hues from many skies.

In the vestibule at the end I said:

"It's early yet. Come and have supper somewhere with me, you had a wretched dinner."

Anything to keep her with me for an hour longer! Any excuse to put off, to delay that frightful wrench that seems to tear out the inside of both body and soul which parting from her to-night would mean.

"Do you want me to come to the studio with you afterwards?" she asked.

I looked back at her with my heart beating violently. Her face was very pale, and the pupils in her eyes dilated.

We had moved through the throng and passed outside.

The night was fine. We walked on, looking out for a disengaged hansom. I could hardly breathe: my heart seemed stifling me. What was in her mind? What would the next few minutes mean for us both?

My brain swam. My thoughts went round in dizzying circles.

"We shan't have time for supper and to go to the studio as well," I answered quietly.

"I don't think I want any supper," she replied.

A sudden joy like a great flame leapt through me as I caught the words.

A crawling hansom came up. I hailed it and put her in and sprang in beside her, full of that delight that touches in its intensity upon agony. "Westbourne Street," I called to the man. "No. 2, The Studio."

CHAPTER V

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

I stood looking through the window of my studio thinking.

The worst had happened, or the best, whichever it was. Viola had become my mistress. She had resolutely refused to be my wife, and the alternative had followed of necessity. The picture had brought us together, it held us together. I could not separate from her without sacrificing the picture, and so destroying her happiness, as she said, and rendering useless all that she had done for me so far.

The picture forced us into an intimacy from which I could not escape and which, now that the devastating clutch of passion had seized me, I could not endure unless she became my own. Viola had seen this and given me herself as unhesitatingly as she had at first given me her beauty for the picture.

In her relations with me she seemed to reach the highest point of unselfishness possible to the human character. For I felt that it was to me and for me she had surrendered herself, not to her own passion nor for her own pleasure.

She would have come day after day and sat to me, shewed me herself and delighted in that self's-reproduction on the canvas, talked to me, delighted in our common worship of beauty, accepted my caresses and—for herself—wanted nothing more.

I had worked well in the past fortnight since the night of the theatre, not so well perhaps as in that first clear period of inspiration, of purely artistic life when Viola was to me nothing but the beautiful Greek I was creating on my canvas, but still, well.

Some may think I naturally should from a sense of gratitude, a sense of duty,—that I should be spurred to do my best, since avowedly Viola had sacrificed all that the work should be good.

But ah, how little has the Will to do with Art!

How well has the German said, "The Will in morals is everything; in
Art, nothing. In Art, nothing avails but the being able."

The most intense desire, the most fervid wish, in Art, helps us nothing. On the contrary, a great desire to do well in Art, more often blinds the eye and clogs the brain and causes our hand to lose its cunning. Unbidden, unasked for, unsought, often in our lightest, most careless moments, the Divine Afflatus descends upon us.

We had arranged to have a week-end together out of town. Fate had favoured us, for Viola's aunt had gone to visit her sister for a few weeks, and the girl was left alone in the town house, mistress of all her time and free to do as she pleased. The short interviews at the studio, delightful as they were, seemed to fail to satisfy us any longer. We craved for that deeper intimacy of "living together."

This is supposed to be fatal to passion in the end, but whether this is so or not, it is what passion always demands and longs for in the beginning.

So we had planned for four days together in the country, four days of May, with a delicious sense of delight and secret joy and warm heart-beatings.

I had dined at her house last night when all the final details had been arranged in a palm-shaded corner by the piano, our conversation covered by the chatter of the other guests. No one knew of our plan, it was a dear secret between us, but it would not have mattered very much if others had known that we were going into the country. I was always supposed to be able to look after Viola, and everybody assumed that it was only a question of time when we should marry each other. We had grown up together, we were obviously very much attached to each other, and we were cousins. And with that amazing inconsistency that is the chief feature of the British public, while it would be shocked at the idea of your marrying your sister, it always loves the idea of your marrying your cousin, the person who in all the world is most like your sister.

However, all we as hapless individuals of this idiotic community have to do is to secretly evade its ridiculous conventions when they don't suit us, and to make the most of them when they do.

And as I was more anxious to marry Viola than about anything else in the world, I welcomed the convention that assigned her to me and made the most of it.

For all that, we kept the matter of our four days to ourselves and planned out its details with careful secrecy.

I was to meet her at Charing-Cross station, and we were going to take an afternoon train down into Kent where Viola declared she knew of a lovely village of the real romantic kind. I had thought we ought to write or wire for rooms at a hotel beforehand, but Viola had been sure she would find what she wanted when we arrived, and she wished to choose a place herself.

So there was nothing more to do. My suit-case was packed, and when the time came to a quarter past two I got into a hansom and drove to the station.

Almost as soon as I got there, Viola drove up, punctual to the minute.

She knew her own value to men too well to try and enhance it by always being late for an appointment as so many women do.

She looked fresh and lovely in palest grey, her rose-tinted face radiant with excitement.

"I haven't kept you waiting, have I?" was her first exclamation after our greeting.

"I had so much work to do for Aunt Mary all the morning, I thought I should not have time to really get off myself."

"No, you haven't kept me waiting," I answered; "and, if you had, it would not have mattered. You know I would wait all day for you."

She glanced up with a wonderful light-filled smile that set every cell in my body singing with delight, and we went down the platform to choose our carriage.

When the train started from Charing Cross the day was dull and heavy-looking; warm, without sunshine. But after an hour's run from town we got into an atmosphere of crystal and gold and the Kentish fruit trees stretched round us a sea of pink and white foam under a cloudless sky.

When we stepped out at our destination, a little sleepy country station, the air seemed like nectar to us. It was the breath of May, real merry, joyous English May at the height of her wayward, uncertain beauty.

We left our light luggage at the station, and walked out from it, choosing at random the first white, undulating road that opened before us.

The little village clustered round the station, but Viola did not want to lodge in the village.

"We can come back to it if we are obliged, but we shall be sure to find a cottage or a wayside inn."

So we went on slowly in the transparent light of a perfect May afternoon.

There are periods when England both in climate and landscape is perfect, when her delicate, elusive loveliness can compare favourably with the barbaric glory, the wild magnificence of other countries.

On this afternoon a sort of rapture fell upon us both as we went down that winding road. The call of the cuckoo resounded from side to side, clear and sonorous like a bell, it echoed and re-echoed across our path under the luminous dome of the tranquil sky and over the hedges of flowering thorn, snow-white and laden with fragrance.

Everywhere the fruit trees were in bloom: delicate masses of white and pink rose against the smiling innocent blue of the sky.

"Now here is the very place," exclaimed Viola suddenly, and following her eyes I saw behind the high, green hedge bordering the road on which we were walking some red roofs rising, half hidden by the masses of white cherry blossom which hung over them. A cottage was there boasting a garden in front, a garden that was filled with lilac and laburnum not yet in bloom; filled to overflowing, for the lilac bulged all over the hedge in purple bunches and the laburnum poured its young leaves down on it. A tiny lawn, rather long-grassed and not innocent of daisies, took up the centre of the garden, and on to this two open casements looked; above again, two open windows, half-lost in the white clouds of cherry bloom.

"But how do you know they've any rooms?" I expostulated.

Viola looked at me with jesting scorn in her eyes.

"I don't know yet, but I'm going to find out."

She put her hand unhesitatingly on the latch of this apparently sacred domain of a private house, opened the gate, and passed in; I followed her inwardly fearful of what our reception might be.

"Men have no moral courage," she remarked superbly as we reached the porch and rang the bell.

A clean-looking woman came to the door after some seconds.

"Apartments? Yes, miss, we have a sitting-room and two bedrooms vacant," she answered to Viola's query. "Shall I show them to you?"

We passed through a narrow, little hall smelling of new oilcloth into a fair-sized room which possessed one of the casements we had seen from outside and through which came the white glow and scent of the cherry bloom and the song of a thrush.

"This will do," remarked Viola with a glance round; "and what bedrooms have you? We only want a sitting-room and one bedroom now."

"Well, ma'am, the room over this is the drawing-room. That's let from next Monday. Then I have a nice double-room, however, I could let with this."

"We will go and see it," said Viola. And we went upstairs.

It seemed a long way up, and when we reached it and the door was thrown open we saw a large room, it was true but the ceiling sloped downwards at all sorts of unexpected angles like that of an attic, and the casements were small, opening almost into the branches of the cherry-tree.

"What do you want for these two?" Viola enquired.

"Five guineas a week, ma'am," returned the woman, placidly folding her hands together in front of her.

I saw a momentary look of surprise flash across Viola's face. Even she, the young person of independent wealth, and who commanded far more by her talents, was taken aback at the figure.

"Surely that's a good deal," she said after a second.

"Well, ma'am, I had an artist here last summer and he had these two rooms, and he said as he was leaving: 'Mrs. Jevons, you can't ask too much for these rooms. The view from that window and the cherry-tree alone is worth all the money.'"

We glanced through the window as she spoke. It was certainly very lovely. A veil of star-like jasmine hung at one side, and without, through the white bloom of the cherry, one caught glimpses of the turquoise-blue of the sky. Beneath, the garden with the wandering thrushes and its masses of lilac; beyond, the soft outline of the winding country road leading to indefinite distance of low blue hills.

"We'll take them for the sake of the cherry-tree," Viola said smiling.

"Will you send to the station for our light luggage and let us have some tea presently?"

The woman promised to do both at once and ambled out of the room, leaving us there and closing the door behind her.

I looked round, a sense of delight, of spontaneous joy, filling slowly every vein, welling up irresistibly all through my being.

For the first time I stood in a room with Viola which we were going to share. No other form of possession, of intimacy, is quite the same as this, nor speaks to a lover in quite the same way.

I looked at her. She stood in the centre of the rather poorly furnished and bare-looking room, in her travelling dress of a soft grey cloth. Her figure that always woke all my senses to rapture, shewed well in the clear, simple lines of the dress. Over the perfect bosom passed little silver cords, drawing the coat to meet.

Beneath her grey straw summer hat, wide-brimmed, a pink rose nestled against the light masses of her hair. Her eyes looked out at me with a curious, tender smile.

She threw herself into a low cane chair by the window, I crossed the room suddenly and knelt beside it.

"Darling, you are pleased to be here with me, are you not?"

"Pleased! I am absolutely happy. I have the sensation that whatever happened I could not possibly be more happy than I am."

She put one arm round my neck and went on softly in a meditative voice:

"I can't think how some girls go on living year after year all through their youth never knowing this sort of pleasure and happiness, for which they are made, can you?"

"They don't dare to do the things, I suppose," I answered.

"Perhaps they wouldn't give them any pleasure, … but it seems extraordinary." Her voice died away. Her blue eyes fixed themselves on me in a soft, dreaming gaze.

I locked both my arms round her waist and kissed her lips into silence. A knock at the door made me spring to my feet. Viola remained where she was, unmoved, and said, "Come in."

A trim-looking maid came in with rather round eyes fixed open to see all she could. She had a can of hot water in her hand.

"Please, mum, I thought you'd like some hot water."

"Very much," returned Viola calmly. "Thank you."

The maid very slowly crossed the room to the washing-stand and set the can in the basin, covering it with a towel with elaborate care and deliberateness, looking at Viola out of the corners of her eyes as she did so.

"Please, m'm, when your luggage comes shall I bring it up?"

"Yes, do please, bring it up at once," replied Viola, and the girl slowly withdrew, shutting the door in the same lengthy manner after her.

Viola got up and crossed to the glass. She took off her hat and smoothed back her hair with her hand. Each time she did so, the light rippled exquisitely over its shining waves.

"I wonder if I ought to wash my face?" she remarked, looking in the glass; "does it look dusty?"

"Not in the least," I said, studying the pink and white reflection in the glass over her shoulder.

"Don't waste the time washing your face. Come and look out of the window."

We went over to the little casement, and leant our arms side by side on the sill.

The glorious afternoon sunlight was ripening and deepening into orange, a burnished sheen lay over everything, the blue hills were changing into violet, the trees along the road stood motionless, soft, and feathery-looking in the sleepy heat. As we looked out we saw a light cart coming leisurely along and recognised our luggage in it.

Some fifteen minutes later the round-eyed maid reappeared, with a man following her carrying our luggage.

"If you please, m'm, Mrs. Jevons says would the gentleman go down and give what orders he likes for dinner for to-day and to-morrow as the tradesmen are here now and would like to know."

"Do you mind going down, Trevor?" Viola asked me. "I want just to get a few of my things out?"

"Certainly not," I answered, "I'll go." And I followed the maid out and downstairs.

When I returned to the room about half-an-hour later, it was empty, and as I looked round it seemed transformed, now that her possessions were scattered about. I walked across it, a curious sense of pleasure seeming to clasp my heart and rock it in a cradle of joy.

I glanced at the toilet table. On the white cloth lay now two gold-backed brushes, a gold-backed mirror and a gold button-hook, a little clock in silver and a framed photograph of me; over the chair by the dressing-table was thrown what seemed a mass of mauve silk and piles of lace. I lifted it very gently, fearing it would almost fall to pieces, it seemed so fragile, and discovered it was her dressing-gown. How the touch of its folds stirred me since it was hers!

I replaced it carefully, wondering at the keen sensation of pleasure that invaded me as the soft laces touched my hands.

I turned to my own suit-case, unstrapped it, opened it, and then pulled out the top drawer of the chest, intending to lay my things in, but I stopped short as I drew it out.

A sheet of tissue paper lay on the top, and underneath this was her dinner-dress—a delicate white cloud of shimmering stuff told me it was that—and at the end of the drawer I saw two little white shoes and white silk stockings.

I paused, looking down at the contents of the drawer, wondering at the wave of emotion they sent through me. Why, when I possessed the girl herself, should these things of hers have any power to move me?

It was perhaps partly because this form of possession, of intimacy, was so new to me, and partly because I was young and still keenly sensitive to all the delights of life and not yet even on the edge of satiety. I lifted one little shoe out and sat down with it in my hand, gazing at its delicate, perfect shape, my heart beating quickly and the blood mounting joyously to my brain.

What a wonderful thing it is, this life in youth when even the sight of a girl's shoe can bring one such keen, passionate pleasure!

Yet what pain, what agony it would be if by chance I had come across this shoe and held it in my hand as now, and there was no violet night to follow, no white arms going to be stretched out through its deep mauve-tinted shadows!

I was still sitting with the shoe in my hand when Viola reappeared, her arms full of lilac.

"I went down to the garden to get some of this," she said. "It looked so lovely. What are you doing, Trevor, sitting there? The woman has made the tea, and it will be much too strong if you don't come down."

She came up behind me and I saw her flush and smile in the glass as she caught sight of her shoe. I looked up, and she coloured still more at my glance.

"I am thinking about this and other things," I said smiling up at her.

She bent over and kissed me and took the shoe out of my hand.

"I am glad you like my little shoe," she said gently with a tender edge to her tone, replacing the shoe in the drawer.

"Now do come down."

She put all the lilac in a great mass in the jug and basin, and we went downstairs.

After tea we went out to explore our new and temporarily acquired territory, and found there was another flower garden at the side of the house. This, like the one in front, was hedged round with lilac laden with glorious blossom of all shades, from deepest purple through all the degrees of mauve to white. Every here and there the line was broken by a May-tree just bursting into bloom that thrust its pink or white buds through the lilac. A narrow path paved with large, uneven, moss-covered stone flags led down the centre and on through a little wicket gate into the kitchen garden beyond, so that altogether there was quite an extensive walk through the three gardens, all flower-lined and sweetly fragrant. We passed slowly along the path down to the extreme end of the kitchen garden where there was a seat under a broad-leaved fig-tree. By the side of the seat stood an old pump, handle and spout shaded by a vine that half trained and half of its own will trailed and gambolled up the old red brick garden wall. A flycatcher perched on the pump handle and thrilled out its gay irresponsible song.

"I have just come over the sea and I am so glad to be here, so glad, so glad," it seemed to be saying, and two swallows skimmed backwards and forwards low down to the earth, gathering mud from a little pool by the pump.

We sat down on the bench and looked out from under the fig-tree at the pure tranquil sky, full of gold light and just tinted with the first rosy flush of evening.

There was complete silence save for the clear, gay, rippling song of the bird, and the deep peace of the scene seemed to fall upon us like an enchanted spell.

Viola dropped her head on my shoulder with a sigh of contentment.

"I am so happy, so content. I feel as glad as that little flycatcher. It has escaped from the sea and the storms and winds, and I've got away from London, its tiresome dinners and hot rooms and all the stupid men who want to marry one."

I laughed and watched her face as it lay against me, and I saw her eyes half-closed as she gazed dreaming into the sunshine.

Faint pink clouds sailed across the sky at intervals like downy feathers blown before a breeze; the flycatcher continued its chattering song to us, some bees hummed with a warm summer-like sound over the wall.

An hour slipped by and seemed only like one golden moment. We heard a bell jangle from the direction of the house, and when I looked at my watch I saw it was time to dress for dinner.

When we retraced our steps the whole garden was bathed in rosy light and the lilac stood out in it curiously and poured forth a wonderful, heavy fragrance as we passed.

The voice of spring, that beautiful low whisper with its promise of summer and cloudless days was in all the air. Had we been married several years I do not think either Viola or I would have found Mrs. Jevons's cooking good nor praised the dinner that night; the attendance also might have been condemned. But as it was we were in that magic mirage of first days together and everything seemed perfect.

When it was over we sought the outside again and sat watching the now paling rose of the sky being replaced by clear, tender green. A passion and rapture of song, the last evening song of the birds, was being poured out on the still dewy air all round us. One by one the songsters grew tired and ceased as a pale star grew visible here and there in the transparent sky, and complete silence fell on the garden. Only a bat flitted across it silently now and then, and the white night-moths came and played by us. I had my arm round her waist and I drew her close to me and looked down upon her through the dusky twilight.

"Let us go, too, dearest, it is quite late."

She looked up, the colour waving all over her face, and smiled back at me, and we went in and upstairs.

When we reached our room, the window was wide open as we had left it and the room seemed full of soft violet gloom, heavy with fragrance of the lilac that shewed its pale mauve stars through the shadows.

It was so beautiful, the effect of the deep summer twilight, that I told her not to light the candles.

"Shew yourself to me in this wonderful mysterious half-light, nothing can be more beautiful."

I sat down on the foot of the bed watching her, my heart beating, every pulse within me throbbing with delight.

Viola did not answer. She did not light the candles, but with the rustle of falling silk and lace began her undressing.

That night I could not sleep. The window stood open, and the room was filled with the soft mysterious twilight of the summer night with its thousand wandering perfumes, its tiny sounds of bats and whirring wings.

The cherry bloom thrust its long, white, scented arms into the room. I lay looking towards the white square of the window wide-eyed and thinking.

A strange elation possessed my brain. I felt happy with a clear consciousness of feeling happy. One can be happy unconsciously or consciously.

The first state is like the sensation one has when lying in hot water: one is warm, but one hardly knows it, so accustomed to the embrace of the water has the body become.

The other state of conscious happiness is like that of first entering the bath, when the skin is violently keenly alive to the heat of the water.

Viola lay beside me motionless, wrapped in a soundless sleep like the sleep of exhaustion. Not the faintest sound of breathing came from her closed lips.

The room was so light I could distinctly see the pale circle of her face and all the undulating lines of her fair hair beside me on the pillow.

I felt the strange delight of ownership borne in upon me as it had never been yet.

We had not dared to pass a night together at the studio.

We had only had short afternoons and evenings, hours snatched here and there, over-clouded by fears of hearing a knock at the door, a footstep outside.

But this deep solitude, these hours of the night when she slept beside me, all powers, all the armour of our intelligence that we wear in our waking moments, laid aside, seemed to give her to me more completely than she had ever given herself before.

And gazing upon her in serene unconsciousness, I felt the intense joy of possession, a sort of madness of satisfaction vibrating through me, stamping that hour on my memory for ever.

The next morning we came down late and enjoyed everything with that keen poignant sense of pleasure that novelty alone can give. To us coming from a stay of months in town the small sitting-room, the open casement window, the simple breakfast-table, the loud noise of birds' voices without, the green glow of the garden seemed delightful, almost wonderful.

So curtains were really white! how strange it seemed. In town they are always grey or brown, and the air was light and thin with a sweet scent, and the sky was blue!!!

It was a fine day, the sun poured down riotously through the snow-white bloom of the cherry-tree, two cuckoos were calling to each other from opposite sides of the wood, and their note, so soft in the distance, so powerful when near, resounded through the shining air till it seemed full of the sound of a great clanging bell, musical and beautiful.

Viola was delighted; her keen ear enjoyed the unusual sound.

"Oh, Trevor, that repeated note, how glorious it is! It reminds me of a sustained note in Wagner's Festpiel. I do wish they'd go on."

She seated herself by the window listening with rapture in her eyes. The woman of the house brought in our coffee, but I doubt if we should have got any breakfast, only the cuckoos wanted theirs and fortunately flew off to get it.

When the glorious musical bell rang out far on the other side of the wood, dimmed by distance, Viola came reluctantly to the table.

"How delicious this is! this being in the country just at first. Look at the table with its jonquils! isn't it pretty? Look at the honey and cream!"

"I think you had better eat some of it," I answered; "or at least pour out the coffee."

Viola laughed and did so, and we breakfasted joyously, full of the curious gayety that belongs to novelty alone.

Then we went out, and the outside was equally entrancing. The scent of the lilac seemed to hang like a canopy in the air under which we walked. There was a fat thrush on the lawn, young and tailless. The sight of him and the dappled marks on his white breast gave me a strange pleasure.

We sat down on the turf finally where the cherry-tree cast a light shade, a sort of white shadow in the sunlight, from its blossoms. Viola thrust her hands down into the cool, green grass.

"How lovely this is," she said, looking up the tall tree above us. "Look at its great tent of white blossoms against the blue sky; it's like a picture of Japan!"

After a time, when we were tired of the garden, we went out and turned down the white road to explore the country.

It was very hot, and the glare from the road excessive, but as it was all new to us it all seemed delightful, even to the white dust that coated our lips and got into our eyes whenever the breeze stirred.

After about a mile and a half of walking we came to an oak wood. The road dipped suddenly between cool, green, mossy banks and lay in deep, grateful shade from the arching oaks above. I climbed the bank on one side and looked into the wood. It was very thick and wild, apparently rarely penetrated. Through the close-growing stems of the undergrowth I saw a bluebell carpet lying like inverted sky beneath the oaks.

"The wood looks very attractive," I said as I rejoined Viola; "but we can't stay to go into it now. We haven't the time; it's half past twelve already."

"I'm sorry," said Viola, looking wistfully at the green wood. "This is the nicest part; but I suppose we can't disappoint that woman by not getting back to luncheon."

So we walked back slowly through the noonday sun, admiring the double pink May peeping out from the green hedges.

When we came in just before lunch, she took the easy chair facing the window, and I sat down on one opposite and watched her. She was wearing a white cambric dress that looked very simple and girlish; she was smiling, and her face was delicately rose-coloured after the walk.

A sense of responsibility came over me. She was my cousin, my own blood relation. I must protect her, must think for her if she would not think for herself.

"You know it's risky being down here like this. You had much better come to some rustic church with me in another village and marry me there."

"No. You know perfectly well I am not going to marry you," she said softly, looking up at me with a smile in her eyes, great pools of blue beneath their exquisitely arched lids.

"It is ridiculous to suppose that you, an artist of twenty-eight, will want to keep faithful to one woman all the rest of your life—or her life. It would be very bad for you, if you did. One can't go against Nature, and Nature has not arranged things that way. Marriage is a pleasure perhaps; but Nature never arranged, marriage, and a man should not allow himself unnatural pleasures."

She was really laughing now, but I knew her resolve was perfectly serious and I did not see how I could break it up.

"Well, but some men do keep to one woman all their life and are none the worse for it; look at a country clergyman for instance."

Viola raised her eyebrows with a laugh.

"How can you be sure of the country clergyman? I expect he goes up to town sometimes…. However, of course I admit he is fairly faithful, but how about being none the worse for it? A country clergyman is about the most undeveloped creature you could have, and a great artist is the most developed, the nearest approach to a god of all human beings."

I did not answer, but sat silent staring at her. She looked such a sweet little Saxon schoolgirl in her white dress, but with such tremendous character and power in those great shining eyes.

"But if we marry now," I said at last, "and anything should … should come between us, I don't see it would be any worse than…."

"Than if we were living together without marriage," she put in quickly. "Yes, I think it would. Look here, if we marry now with a great blaze and fuss, and invite all our friends to see the event, which is great nonsense anyway, and then you see some other woman later you covet, it seems to me there are only three ways open to us: either you go without the woman and suffer very much in consequence and always owe me a grudge for standing in your way; or you take her and I have to profess to see nothing and look on quietly, which I could never stand, it would send me mad; or we must have all the trouble and worry and scandal of a divorce and call in the public to witness our quarrel; and why should we have the public to interfere in our affairs?" she added, her eyes flashing. "What is it to them whom I love or whom I live with, whom I leave or quarrel with? These are all private matters."

"And if we live together and the same thing happens?" I pursued quietly.

"Why, then we should separate, only without any trouble, any publicity; we should fall apart naturally. If you preferred any one else, you must go to her; I should slip away out of your life, and we should each be free and untied."

"If it's so much better for the man to change," I said smiling, "it must be the same for the woman."

"So it is," rejoined Viola quickly; "the more men a woman has the more developed she is, the better for her morally, if there is no conventional disgrace attaching to it. Amongst the Greeks, Aspasia and all those women of her class were far more intellectual, more developed than the wives who were kept at home to spin and rear children."

"All these things ought to be optional. If a woman loves one man so much she wants to stay with him for ever and ever, probably through such a great passion she reaches her highest development; but until she has found that man she ought to be allowed to go from one to another without any disgrace attaching to it. And, of course, just the same law holds good for the man."

"Outsiders like the world and the law ought never to be allowed to interfere between a man and a woman. They never can know the right or the wrong of their relations to each other well enough to enable them to be judges. Nobody ever knows but the man and the woman themselves, and they ought to be left alone; what they do, whether in quarrelling or love, ought to be as private as the prayers one sends to Heaven."

She paused, and through the window came the gay, loud, triumphant call of the cuckoo seeking its mate of an hour in the heart of the glad green wood.

Viola listened with a look of delight.

"How happy they are!" she said. And the note came again, instinct with love and joy.

"How well Nature arranged everything, and how Man has spoiled it all! Fancy passion, the most subtle, evanescent, delicate, elusive emotion—and yet one so strong—fancy that being bound down by crabbed and crooked laws, being confined by wretched little conventions!"

"But, anyway, we shall have to say we are married here."

"Oh, say anything you like," rejoined Viola laughing; "saying doesn't do any harm."

"Yes, but then we must fix some place where we've been married and all that, do you see; we'd better go somewhere further off I think and stay away some time and come back married. I do feel very worried about it, Viola. I think it would be much simpler to do it than to lie about it."

Viola jumped up and came over to me.

"Dear Trevor, I am so sorry you are worried, but really it will work out all right. We will go abroad somewhere from here, we might go to Rome, it's a lovely time of year, and then to Sicily, to Taormina, … and we'll stay away a year and you finish the picture and I'll write an opera, and then we'll come back married to town in the season and we'll have been married before we leave England of course, and then it will be a year ago, and I don't think anybody will bother about it much."

I looked down upon her. She was so pretty and so dear to me: I must keep her, and if those were the only terms upon which she would stay with me I must accept them.

The landlady came into the room at this minute followed by the maid to lay the luncheon; in the landlady's hand was a fat, black book which she presented diffidently to Viola.

"It's the Visitors' book, ma'am," she said. "I thought you and the gentleman would like to write your names in it in case of any letters…."

"Yes, very much," returned Viola promptly, with a little side smile at me, and sat down and wrote in it.

When she had done so, she closed the book, and as the maid was in and out of the room during luncheon, it was not till it was finished and cleared away and we were alone that I asked her what she had written.

"Mr. and Mrs. Lonsdale; that's right, isn't it? I did not put Trevor for I always think 'make your lies short' is a good rule."

"I thought you were such a truthful person," I said a little sadly.

"So I am—to you, for instance, so I should be to any one who has the right to hear truth; but the world has no right, and I don't care what lies I tell it, it's such an inquisitive old bore!"

I laughed. Viola always made you laugh when you felt you ought to be angry with her.

"Come out now," I said, "let's enjoy this lovely afternoon. I should like to paint you under that tree," I added musingly, looking out on the tree in its white glory.

"In your usual style?" she returned laughing. "I don't think you could here. Mrs. Jevons would turn me out as not being respectable; not even being Mrs. Lonsdale would save me."

"You would make a lovely picture, even dressed," I returned, musing; "but then of course it would not sell for half the price."

"Nothing is really snapped at but the nude. That lovely landscape I painted when I was young and foolish,—it took me two years to work it off, and the veriest little daub of an unclothed girl goes directly at a hundred guineas."

"A great compliment to our natural charms," laughed Viola. "I am delighted personally at anything that is a note of protest against the tyranny of the dressmaker and fashion."

"What shall we do?" I queried; "it's beautifully hot," I added persuasively.

"I'll tell you: we will go into the oak wood; the oaks grow low and the ground and the land rise all round, no one can possibly see us without coming quite close; on that blue carpet you shall paint me lying asleep, we will call the picture 'The Soul of the Wood,' and you shall sell it for a thousand. Come along."

So it was decided, and with one of her thick cloaks, that she could throw round her instantly if surprised, and my artist's pack we started for the wood.

It was a hot golden day, the one day we should get of really fine weather in the whole English year, and when we reached the wood the light under the oak boughs was magnificent, a soft mellow glory falling down on the blue hyacinths which grew so closely together that it was as if a sea of vivid colour had invaded the dell or a great patch of the blue sky had fallen there.

We had difficulty in getting into the wood as the undergrowth of young oak scrub made it almost impenetrable; it stood up straight, and the great, swaying, huge, spreading boughs of the old oaks above came down and rested on and amongst the young oaks, like a roof upon pillars, and the leaves of both intermingled till they were like green silk curtains hung from ceiling to floor. When we had finally pushed through almost on our hands and knees to the centre of the wood, the scrub grew less close, the carpet of blue was perfect, a circle of green shut us in, we were in a magic chamber, through the roof of which came floods of green and golden light.

Viola cast aside the "tyranny of the dressmaker" and shook out her light hair. Then she threw herself on the hyacinth bed, looking upwards to the low arching roof. At that moment the call of the cuckoo, wild, entrancing, came overhead, and she raised her arms with a look of rapture as the slim grey bird dashed through the upper oak branches in pursuit of its mate. It was a perfect pose for the "Soul of the Wood," and I begged her to keep it while I rapidly caught the idea and sketched it in roughly in charcoal.

Those happy sunlit hours in the wood, how fast they slipped away! I was absorbed in the work and completely happy in it, and Viola I believe was equally happy in the delight she knew she was giving me.

We came back very hungry to our tea, and very pleased with ourselves, the sketch, and our successful afternoon.

It was six o'clock, the light was mellowing, and a thrush singing with all its own wonderful passion and rapture on the lawn. The scent of the lilac, intensely sweet, came in at the window and filled the room.

In the evening we went out and sat under the cherry-tree, watching the stars come out and gleam through its white bloom.

"Sing me the Abendstern," murmured Viola, leaning her head against me. "I was a dutiful model all the afternoon, it's your turn to amuse me now."

So I sang the Abendstern to her under the cherry-tree, and its white shadow enveloped us both, making her face look very beautiful under it; and when I had finished singing we kissed each other and agreed that the world was a very delightful place as long as there was Wagner's music in it, and cherry-trees to sit under, and white bloom and stars and lips to kiss.

Between nine and ten, after a very countrified supper we went up to bed in the slanting-roofed room under the thatch, full still of the tender light of a spring evening.

The next day was delicious, too, and the next, but on the fourth we were quite ready to go. We had drained the cup of joy which that particular place held for us and it had no more to offer. The cherry-tree pleased us still, but it did not give us the ecstatic thrill of the first view of it. The lilac scent streamed in, but it did not go to the head and intoxicate us as when we came straight from the air of Waterloo; the thrush gurgled as passionately on the deep green lawn, but the gurgle did not stir the blood. All was the same, only the strange spell of novelty was gone.

Viola seemed so pleased to be leaving it quite hurt me. When I went upstairs I found her packing her little handbag with alacrity and singing.

"Are you glad to be going?" I asked.

"Yes," she said surprised; "are not you?"

"But you have been happy here?" I said with a tone of remonstrance.

"Oh, yes!" she exclaimed; "wildly, intensely happy! It's been four days' enchantment, but then it's gone now; we can't get any more out of this place. We have enjoyed it so much we have drained it, exhausted it; like the bees, we must move on to a fresh flower."

It was true that was all we could do, yet I looked round the bare attic-like room with regret. Could ever another give me more than that had done? Could there ever be a keener joy, a deeper delight than I had known in the shadows of that first violet night?

PART THREE

THE BLACK NIGHT

CHAPTER VI

IN MAYFAIR

The spring of the next year found us installed in a small house in
Mayfair, for the season.

For a year we had been abroad; the summer in Italy, the winter in Egypt, and had come back with our eyes full of colour, armed against the deadly greyness of England for three months at least.

We had travelled as Mr. and Mrs. Lonsdale, we came back as Mr. and Mrs. Lonsdale. There had been no difficulty so far. Every one seemed satisfied, and what was far more important, so were we.

The whole top floor of the Mayfair house was my studio, and made a fairly large and convenient one. We kept on the old studio as a matter of sentiment, but rarely went there now.

The "Phryne" and the "Soul of the Wood" had been finished and accepted for exhibition. Both were sold, the "Phryne" for five thousand pounds, the "Soul of the Wood" for four thousand, and I had brought from abroad many unfinished sketches and partly finished pictures.

In all this time we had lived very close to each other: Viola had been my only model against an ever-varied background. Not the faintest shadow had flecked the sunshine of our passion for each other. Viola had written her operetta, and it had been taken for a London theatre. A Captain Lawton had written the libretto under the title of the "Lily of Canton." The music was weird and charming, suited to the strange Chinese story and scenery. It was to be produced in May, and Viola always spoke of the first night with excited joy.

It had been a full, rich year. Like bees, as Viola had said, we had gone from flower to flower, draining the honey from each new blossom and passing on. New places, new skies, new scenes had all in turn contributed to our pleasure and given us inspiration which took form again in our art.

The vivid desert backgrounds, the light-filled skies of Upper Egypt crept into my pictures, the cry of impassioned Eastern music in the forbidden dancing-dens of Keneh stole into Viola's refrains.

On that sunny afternoon in April, as we took tea in our tiny and gimcrack drawing-room together, Viola and I felt in the best of spirits.

"Captain Lawton and Mr. and Mrs. Dixon are coming in to dinner to-night," Viola remarked. "Lawton tells me he saw the manager yesterday, and the piece seems getting on all right."

"I am very glad," I answered. "Do you know, Viola, a Roman girl called here this morning, and wanted me to take her on as a model. She's very good. I think I'd better secure her, if … if…."

"If what…?" asked Viola smiling.

"Well, if you don't mind," I answered, colouring.

"Mind? I? No, dearest Trevor. Of course not. You must want a new model by now. Do engage her by all means. Is she good altogether?"

"I don't know. I have only seen her face yet. That's very lovely. Veronica she calls herself. I thought, anyway, she would do splendidly for the head."

"What a piece of good luck she should come now. You were just wanting a model for your Roman Forum picture," returned Viola. And then the matter dropped, for some women came in to tea and broke off the conversation.

At eleven o'clock the next morning I was in my studio, awaiting Veronica. I was pleased, interested, elated. The girl was really beautiful, and the sight of beauty exhilarates and animates like wine.

She was very punctual and came confidently into the room as the clock struck. The cold morning light through a north window fell upon her and instead of the light warming the face as so often happens, her face seemed to warm the light. She was about sixteen, with a skin of velvet, dark, quite dark, but clear as wine, and with a wonderful red flush glowing through the cheek; the eyes were brilliant, brown to blackness, but full of fire and lustre; her hair, dark as midnight, clustered and fell about her face in soft curls. The nose was dainty, refined, with perfect nostrils, the mouth deepest red and curved with the most tender, seducing lines. I had never seen such a face. The beauty of it was glorious, to an artist awe-inspiring.

I stood gazing at her, delighted, spellbound, and the young person keenly observed my admiration. She smiled, revealing true Italian teeth, exquisite, white, and perfect.

"I am Veronica Bernandini," she said. "I have two hours to spare in the morning and three in the afternoon."

My first thought was not to let any other artist have her; not till I had painted her at any rate and startled London with her face.

"Are you sitting to any one else?" I asked mechanically.

"No. I give the rest of my time to my family. We are very poor. My mother and father are old. I am their sole support."

I waved my hand impatiently. All models tell you that. One gets so tired of it.

"What do you want an hour? I will take all your time. You must not sit to any one else."

Her eyes gleamed, and the lovely crimson mouth pouted.

"Five shillings an hour if you take the five hours a day," she answered.

"I suppose you know that's double the ordinary price?" I said smiling. "However, I don't mind. I'll pay you if I find you sit well. Take off your hat now and sit down—anywhere. I want just to make a rough sketch of your head."

She obeyed, and I drew out some large paper sheets and found a piece of charcoal. Sitting down opposite her, I gazed at her meditatively. Now that her hat had been removed I could see the extraordinary wealth and beauty of her hair. It was black with lights of red and gold fire in it, and fell in its own natural waves and curls and clusters all about her small head and smooth white forehead.

What about a Bacchante? She was a perfect study for that. I always imagined—perhaps from seeing antiques, where it is so represented, that the head of a Bacchante should have hair like this; and it is rare enough in English models. Suppose I made a large picture—The Death of Pentheus—the king in Euripides' tragedy of the Bacchæ who in his efforts to put down the Bacchanalia was slain by the enraged Bacchantes. Suppose I put this one in the foreground…. But then it seemed a pity to spoil such a lovely face with a look of rage…. Well, anyway, let me have a sketch first, and see what inspiration came to me. I got up and looked amongst my odd possessions for a vine-leaf wreath I had. When I found it and some ivy leaves, I came back to her and fastened them round her head, in and out of those wonderful vine-like tendrils of hair. She sat demurely enough and very still while I did so, but when I wanted to unfasten the ugly modern bodice and turn it down from her throat so as to get the head well poised and free, she pressed her lips on my hand as it passed round her neck.

I drew my hand away.

"Don't be silly, or I shan't employ you," I said with some annoyance.

She pushed out her crimson lips.

"You are too handsome to be an artist; they are mostly such guys."

"Hush, be quiet now, be still," I said, moving back from her to see if I had the effect I wanted. I felt with a sudden rush of delight I had. The face was just perfect now: the head a little inclined, the leaves in the glossy hair, no more exact image of the idea the word Bacchante always formed in my mind could be imagined.

I sketched her head in rapidly. I made two or three draughts of it in charcoal, then I got my colours and did a rough study of it in colour. Her neck, like that of almost all Italians, was a shade too short, but round and lovely in shape and colour. The time passed unnoticed, and it was only when the luncheon gong sounded I realised how long I had been at work.

I sprang up and gathered the sheets of paper together.

"That's all now," I said. "I'll take you again three to six. Are you tired?" I added, as she got up rather slowly and took up her hat.

"No," she answered, shaking her head. "All that was sitting down; that's easy."

Her voice sounded flat, but I was too hurried to take much notice of it. I wanted to get down to show Viola the work.

"Well, three o'clock then," I repeated, and ran downstairs.

Viola was waiting in the dining-room, but not at the table. I went over to the window where she was standing, and showed her the sketches.

"Oh, Trevor, how lovely; how perfectly beautiful!" she exclaimed, gazing at the charcoal head.

"You have done that well, and what a glorious face!"

I flushed with pleasure.

"I'm so glad you like it. Come up this afternoon and see the model, see me work. Say you're out, and let's have tea in the studio."

"Very well," she answered as the luncheon came in; "I'll say we want tea up there. What a good idea to make her a Bacchante; it's the very face for it."

"Suppose I took her as a Bacchante dancing, the whole figure I mean, nude, under a canopy of vine leaves, make all the background, everything, green vines with clusters of purple grapes, and then have her dancing down the sort of avenue towards the foreground, with the light pouring down through the leaves. How do you think that would be?"

"I should think it would be lovely," Viola answered slowly, with a little sigh.

I looked across at her quickly.

"You would like to be my only model for the body?" I said gently, keeping my eyes on her face.

"No, Trevor, I really don't want to be selfish, and I do think you should have another, only…."

"Yes, only…?"

"Well, when a woman is in love she does so long to be able to assume all sorts of different forms, to be different women, so as to always please and amuse and satisfy the man she loves. How delightful it would be if one could change! One can be pretty, one can be amiable, clever, charming, anything, but one cannot be different from oneself; one must be the same, one can't get away from that."

I laughed.

"I don't want you to be different. I should be overwhelmed if you suddenly changed into some one else! And whatever models I have, you will always be the best. There could not be another such perfect figure as yours."

Viola smiled, but an absent look came into her face.

After luncheon we both went up to the studio together, and Viola was ensconced in my armchair when Veronica's knock came on the door.

I said, "Come in," and she entered with the confident air of the morning. Directly she saw Viola, however, she seemed to stiffen with resentment, and stood still by the door.

"Come in," I repeated, "and shut the door."

Viola looked at her kindly and laid down the charcoal sketch in her lap.

"I have been looking at your head here and thinking it so beautiful," she said gently.

Veronica only stared at her a little ungraciously in return, and took off her hat in silence.

I put her back into position, re-arranged the fillet on her head, and set to work to complete the colour study.

We worked in unbroken silence till tea was brought up at four. Viola rose to make it, and I told the girl to get up and move about if she liked, and I set the canvas aside to dry. Viola offered the girl a cup of tea, but she refused it and went and sat under the window on an old couch, leaving us by the table.

The canvas was a success in a way so far, but the great sweetness of the expression in the charcoal sketch of the morning was not there.

When tea was over I went up to Veronica and told her I must leave the canvas of the head to dry, I could not work more on it then, and asked her if she would pose for me as the Bacchante dancing. I wanted to see if she would do for a larger picture.

I got no answer for a minute. Veronica looked down and began to pull at the faded fringe of an old cushion.

At last I repeated my question.

"Not while she's here," she muttered in a low, fierce tone.

I was surprised at the resentment in look and voice.

"Nonsense," I said with some annoyance. "You can pose before her as well as before me."

Veronica did not answer, only pulled in sullen silence at the cushion.

"You are wasting my time," I said impatiently.

Veronica looked through the window.

"I shan't take off my clothes before her," she muttered defiantly.

I turned away from her in annoyance and approached Viola who had not moved from her chair on the other side of the room. She sprang up and came to meet me.

"She objects to my being here?" she said quickly. "Is it bothering you? Because, if it is, I'll go; that'll settle it."

"It's awfully stupid. I'm so sorry, Viola; it's so idiotic of her."

Viola smiled brightly up at me.

"Never mind, I'll go. You'll be down soon, now."

I held the door open for her, and with a smiling nod at me she passed through and went down the stairs. I waited till her bright head had disappeared, and then closed the door and went back to Veronica.

"Now," I said, "Mrs. Lonsdale has left us. Will you get up and stand as I want you to? Or do you want me to dismiss you?"

I felt extremely angry and annoyed. My heart beat violently. Viola had come there by my invitation, she had deprived herself of any possible society for the afternoon, and now had been practically turned out by this impertinent little model.

Veronica got sulkily up from the couch and began to undress in silence.

I walked away and flung myself into the armchair Viola had vacated, and picked up the charcoal sketch.

How sweet the face was in that! And yet what an awful little devil the girl on the couch had looked.

I was so accustomed to Viola's unfailing either good temper or self-command, that I was beginning to forget women had bad tempers as well as men.

After a minute or two Veronica came over to me; she had let her hair down, and it fell prettily on her shoulders. I laid down the charcoal sketches and looked at her critically as she approached.

Her figure had all the beauty of great plumpness and youthfulness. Every contour was round and full, and yet firm. Her body was beautiful in the sense that all healthy, sound, young, well-formed things are, but there was, as it were, no soul in the beauty, nothing transcendent in any of the lines or in the colour. It was something essentially of earth, un-dreamlike, appealing to the senses, and to them alone.

I was struck with the great contrast it presented to the form of Viola, which was so wonderfully ethereal, so divine in colour and design. Every line in it was long and tapering, never coming to a sudden stop, but merging with infinite grace into the next, and the dazzling, immaculate whiteness of it all made it seem like something of heaven. It suggested the vision, the ideal, all that man longs after with his soul, that stirs the celestial fires within his brain, not merely the flame of the senses.

In the form before me, the lines were short and often abrupt, the curves quick and expressionless; it would do capitally for the "Bacchante," it would not have served for a moment for the "Soul of the Wood."

The girl was smiling now, and appeared quite amiable. Most people are when they have got their own way. She asked me if I thought she would do.

"Yes, I think you will. Stand back there, please, against that green curtain. Now put one foot forward as if you were advancing. Yes, that's right; lift both your arms up over your head."

I got up to give her a hoop of wire to hold as an arch over her, and put a spray of artificial ivy over it.

"That'll do. Now stand still, and let's see how that works out."

The girl posed well. Evidently she was a model of considerable practice, and I obtained an excellent sketch before a quarter to six, when she said she must leave off and dress.

She did so in silence, while I studied my own work. When she had her hat on I looked up and asked her if she wanted to be paid.

"No," she answered, "we'll leave it till the end of the week.
Good-bye."

"Good-bye," I said, and she went out. I laid the sketch on the table beside me, and sat thinking. A sudden blankness fell upon me as I stood mentally opposite this new idea that had never presented itself to me in the same form before, that in my former easy, wandering existence I had always welcomed a beautiful model, not only for the gain to my art, but because of the incidental pleasure it might bring me. But now I realised suddenly that this girl's beauty brought me no elation. It was not any use, and in a flash I saw, too, that no woman now, no beauty could be any use to me ever any more, for I was not a single irresponsible existence any longer, but involved with another which was sacred to me.

How often in the past, when entangled in some light liaison, I had wished for deeper, stronger emotions, something to wake the mind and stir the soul! Then in my love for Viola I had found all these and welcomed them madly. She had stirred my whole sleeping being into flame, and given me those keener and stronger desires of the brain, and satisfied them; and till now it had seemed to me that this passion for her was a free gift from the hands of Fate. Now, suddenly, I saw that the gift had its price. That, after all, there was something to be said for those light free loves of the past. That some joy had been taken out of life, now those glittering trifles, toys of the senses, were taken from me, made impossible.

For the first time I realised that a great passion has its yoke, and that, in return for the great joy it gives, it demands and takes one's freedom.

I sat motionless, feeling overwhelmed by the sudden blaze of light that the simple incident of this model's advent had thrown on an obscure psychological fact.

I saw now that my love for Viola was not wholly a gain, not something extra added to my life's-cup that made it full to overflowing, but, as always in this life, something had been taken away as well as added.

I felt as a child might feel who was presented with a magnificent gift with which he was overjoyed, but who on taking it to the nursery to add to his other treasures, saw his nurse locking these all away from him for ever in a glass case above his reach.

As the child might, I hugged my new gift to me and delighted in it, but I could not help feeling regret for those other small, glittering toys with which I had formerly played so much, now shut away behind the deadly glass pane of conscience.

It was not that Veronica appealed to me specially. I did not feel I cared whether she came to the studio again or not except for the picture, but the great principle involved, now that I was face to face with it, appalled me.

Viola had sought to leave me free, by refusing marriage with me; but, after all, what difference does the mere nominal tie make?

The essential attribute of a great passion—something that cannot be eliminated from it—is the chain of fidelity it forges round its prisoners.

I do not know how long I sat there, but at last I rose mechanically, put the sheets of paper together, and went downstairs.

As I came to the drawing-room door I heard that Viola was playing. The door stood ajar, and silently I entered and took my seat behind her. She was improvising, just playing as the inspiration came to her, and wholly absorbed and unconscious of my presence. There was a great glass facing her, in which her whole image was reflected, and had she glanced into it she must have seen me; but she did not. Her eyes gazed out before her, wrapt, delighted; her face was quite white, her lips parted in a little smile.

I saw she was under the influence of her music and absolutely happy, full of joy, such as I could never give her. A great jealousy ran through me, kindling all that passion I had for her. The thoughts and reflections of an hour back seemed swept out of mind like dead leaves before a storm. No other lighter loves could give me one-tenth of the emotion that the pursuit and conquest of this strange soul could do. For I had not conquered it. It was absorbed in, and lived in mysteries of joy that its art alone could give it, and I was outside—almost a stranger to it.

The thought burnt and stung me, and the fire of it wrapped round me as I sat watching her. That body, so slim, so perfect, she had given me, but I wanted more, I wanted that inner spirit to be mine, I wanted to conquer that.

I watched her in a fierce, jealous anger, almost as I might have done seeing her caressed by another lover, she was so wonderfully happy, so independent of me, so unconscious of me; but man loves that which is above him, difficult to obtain, hard to pursue. We cannot help it. We are made to be hunters, and I felt I loved Viola then with fresh passion.

Some time or other I would succeed in breaking through that charmed circle in which she lived, in making her yield up to me the spiritual maidenhood which, as it were, was hers.

I would be first and last and everything to her, and not even her art should count beside me.

I closed my eyes and put my head back on the couch where I was sitting and gave myself up to listening to the music.

How the instrument answered her! What a divine melody rose from it, floating gently on the air like quivering wings.

Then suddenly came a storm of passion, and the room was filled with a tempest of sound, while one strong thread of melody low down in the bass ran through it all and seemed a fierce reproach of one in anguish. At last one sheet of sound seemed to sweep the piano from end to end, a cry of dismay, of pain, the woe and grief of one who sees his world shattered suddenly before his eyes; then there was silence. I sprang up and clasped her in my arms.

"Trevor," she exclaimed, like one awakening from a dream; "I had no idea you were there."

"No," I said savagely; "you were so absorbed, you never noticed me come in."