'Ah, that was the worst of it! For six weeks he seemed to worship me, and I--I never knew whether it was wet or fine--warm or cold. Every wind blew from the south for me, neither winter nor death could come near the earth again. We were away, you know, in Normandy and Brittany--when I try to think of heaven I always see the sea with the sun on it, and the long stretches of sand. Before we came back I knew--I felt--that a change was coming, that life would not be always like that; but I did not know, of course I could not know, what a great change it would be. Fabian said, "Our holiday is over now, dearest, we must get to work again! My Art is crying to me." Well, I was ready enough to yield to the claims of Art, real Art, not the poor ghost of it papa used to call up; and I was eager for my husband to take a foremost place among artists, as I knew and felt he could do. But when we got back to England--to London--to this Art which was calling to us to shorten our holiday, I found--or thought I found--that it had handsome aquiline features, and a title, and that it wore splendid gowns of materials which my husband had to choose, and that it found its own husband and its own friends wearisome, and--well, that Fabian was painting her portrait, which was to make his fortune and proclaim him a great painter.' 'Who was she?' I asked in a low voice. She named the beautiful countess whose portrait I had seen on Scott's mantelpiece on the morning when I visited him at his chambers. 'She came to our rooms several times for sittings, as she had gone to his studio before he married me. But she found it was too far to come--Bayswater being so much farther than Jermyn Street from Kensington Palace Gardens!--and he had to finish the picture in her house. How the world swam round me, and my brain hammered in my head on those dreadful days when I knew he was with her, glancing at her with those very glances which used to set my heart on fire and make me silent with deep passionate happiness. I had seen him look at her like that when he gave her those few sittings which she found so tiresome because, I suppose, of my jealous eyes. I never said anything--I didn't, indeed, Mr. Maude, for I knew he was the man, and I was only the woman, and I must be patient; but the misery and disappointment began to eat into my soul when I found that those looks I had loved and cherished so were never to be given to me again. At first I thought it would be all right when this portrait was painted and done with; this brilliant lady's caprice of liking for my clever husband would be over, and I should have, not only the careless kindness which never failed, but the old glowing warmth that I craved like a child starving in the snow. But it never came back.' A dull hopelessness was coming into her voice as she continued speaking, and her great eyes looked yearningly out over the feathery larches in the avenue to the darkening sky. 'When that picture was finished there were other