The nearer picture was a marine, in which the Irish coast and waters of the Channel were revealed by light of the full moon, and between the headland and the foreground the white gulls were bedding themselves so closely that they made a second moon path on the water. Back flew Brooke’s thoughts across the sea,—England and Holland held her for a moment, then she slipped on to France, to Paris, where for a year she had worked in Ridgeway’s studio in the Rue Malesherbes and out at Passy, had been oftentimes elated and finally cast down. How a past mood can dominate the present as well as all surroundings! The next painting was of a stretch of low country threaded by a canal, cattle in the distance, and shivering poplars bending to the wind that scudded across the sky in threatening clouds, while in the foreground a flock of geese were looking about and pluming themselves against the coming storm. Where had that scene passed before her? “The Coming Storm near The Hague—E. Oliver (Salon, 1900),” said the catalogue. “Ah!” Brooke exclaimed, half aloud. She remembered her first visit to the Salon, of standing before this same picture with Marte Lorenz, “the big hybrid English-Dutch-French artist,” Lucy Dean called him, and laughing at the solemn, stupid geese, while he had told her in his perfect, slow English that he had often driven flocks of geese to pasture in his boyhood, also that sometimes he had found them to be no laughing matter,—a trifling incident at the time, but now a sort of landmark in the receding journey. She had met this Lorenz (Marte his intimates called him) often that winter and spring on the easy impersonal footing that prevails between the well-bred American woman and the art students of all countries. He had been presented to her mother most regularly at a fête in Ridgeway’s garden the autumn of their arrival, and from that moment until their parting, a year later, one thing had set him apart from all the score of men with whom she had come in close contact, men who blindly flattered, evaded, or temporized. He had always told her the truth about her work. If she had not realized it at the time, the conviction had always come to her sooner or later. As to Lorenz himself, once a pupil of the Beaux Arts, his nationality prevented his striving for the Prix-de-Rome, and he had turned his work toward less classic lines; landscapes were his forte, the figure coming second, and yet he oftenest worked at figure-painting and conventional portraiture also, for he must have money for the pot-boiling, much as he disliked the necessity.