After the cloth was removed Clytie continued the book she had been reading during the meal, and at last flung it aside. She rose and walked about the room, somewhat restless. She felt lonely--vaguely desirous of action, and yet idle. Was it a dumb premonition of fate, this restlessness? At any rate it led her to perform a trivial action which set in motion the currents of her future life. She sat down at her writing table that stood in the recess between the fireplace and the light-curtained window and lit a couple of candles, whose pretty red paper shades threw a rosy glow around the corner of the room. It was only a simple note that she scribbled, hastily, boldly, as was her wont. Then she left the candles burning, and returned to her armchair by the fire and gave herself up to meditation. The boy model she had engaged that morning interested' her powerfully. She shrank from an insistence upon the solution of the little problem she had offered to Winifred during the afternoon, hovering over and away from it. Her sense of type and personality was too acute not to be profoundly struck by the difference between his mother and himself. On the one hand was dulness, commonness, a coarse-fibred nature responsive to the stirrings of neither hope nor despair, a dull, uncomplaining drudge; on the other hand a quick, fiery temperament, showing itself in flashing black eyes, delicate nostrils, wiry, curly brown hair--all made picturesque by unqualified dirt. And yet, despite this refinement of feature, there was cruelty, brutality even, written on the childish face. That might be the fault of his upbringing, thought Clytie. But his beauty--where did it come from? She smiled as she thought of King Cophetua. It was the beggar maiden's grace that had won the king's heart, and grace was a quality that Jack's mother most distinctly lacked. Clytie felt dimly conscious of being on the verge of an appalling discovery. Her reading had been catholic enough, and her independent acquaintance with life sufficiently broad, to render the fact familiar to her that kings and beggar maidens if they fall in love with each other usually dispense with the ceremony of marriage. But then love pardons all--a formula in Clytie's new theory of social statics, perhaps wisely not accepted in Durdleham--and all the sorrow in lawlessness that had come within Clytie's small experience had been in her eyes sanctified by love. Yet who could have loved this woman? She was not more than three-and-thirty now--young enough to show that she had never possessed the mere attraction of comeliness. The boy remained, however, a living proof.