"'I am sorry to find,'" Kendal dictated slowly, a few words at a time, "'that the flaws in my regard for you are sufficiently considerable--to attract your attention as strongly as your letter indicates. The right of judgment in so personal a matter--is indisputably yours, however--and I write to acknowledge, not to question it.'" "Dear, that isn't as I feel." "It's as you will feel," Kendal replied ruthlessly. "Now add: 'I have to acknowledge the very candid expression of your opinion of myself--which does not lose in interest--by the somewhat exaggerated idea of its value which appears to have dictated it,--and to thank you, for your extremely kind offer to send me a picture. I am afraid, however--even in view of the idyllic considerations you mention--I cannot allow myself to take advantage of that--" "On the whole I wouldn't allude to the shattered ideal--" "Oh-no, dear. Go on." "Or the fact that you probably wouldn't be able to hang it up," he added grimly. "Now write 'You may be glad to know that the episode in my life--which your letter terminates--appears to me to be of less importance than you perhaps imagine it--notwithstanding a certain soreness over its close.'" "It doesn't, Jack." "It will. I wouldn't say anything more, if I were you; just 'yours very truly, Janet Cardiff.'" She wrote as he dictated, and then read the letter slowly over from the beginning. "It sounds very hard, dear," she said, lifting eyes to his which he saw were full of tears, "and as if I didn't care." "My darling," he said, taking her into his arms, "I hope you don't--I hope you won't care, after to-morrow. And now, don't you think we've had enough of Miss Elfrida Bell for the present?" CHAPTER XXXV. At three o'clock, an hour before he expected the Cardiffs, John Kendal ran up the stairs to his studio. The door stood ajar, and with a jealous sense of his possession within, he reproached himself for his carelessness in leaving it so. He had placed the portrait the day before where all the light in the room fell upon it, and his first hasty impression of the place assured him that it stood there still. When he looked directly at it he instinctively shut the door, made a step or two forward, closed his eyes and so stood for a moment, with his hands before them. Then, with a groan, "Damnation!" he opened them again and faced the fact. The portrait was literally in rags: They hung from the top of the frame and swung over the bottom of it Hardly enough of the canvas remained unriddled to show that it had represented anything human. Its destruction was absolute--fiendish, it seemed to Kendal. He dropped into a chair and stared with his knee locked in his hands. "Damnation!" he repeated, with a white face. "I'll never approach it again;" and then he added grimly, still speaking aloud, "Janet will say I deserved it."