He made no reply. So, owing to him there was fixed enmity between Fanny and Elizabeth! His mood of depression deepened, and he went to his room. He picked a book from the shelves at random and opened it—De Quincey’s “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts.” He had entirely forgotten the existence of that piece of macabre irony, and gazed stupidly at the large-type title. Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts. How damned appropriate. He put it down and began to look over his painting materials. Elizabeth had taken his sketching blocks and paper and all his unused canvases except one. The tubes of paint had gone hard and dry, and his palette was covered with shrunken hard blobs of paint just as he had left it fifteen months before. He carefully cleaned it, as if he might be sent before his Company officer under the charge of having a dirty palette. He turned up some of his old sketches and looked through them. Could it be that he had composed them? They were undoubtedly signed “G. Winterbourne.” He looked at them critically, and then slowly tore them up, threw them in the empty fire-grate, struck a match and set fire to them. He watched the paper curl up under the creeping flame, glow dull red, and shrink to black fragile ash. Numbers of his canvases were stacked in little neat piles against the wall. He ran through them rapidly, letting them fall back into place as if they had been cards. He paused when he came upon a forgotten portrait of himself. Had he painted that? Yes, it was signed with his name. Now, when and where had he done it? He held the small canvas in his hands, gazing intently at it with a prodigious effort of memory, but simply could not remember anything about it. The picture was undated, and he could not even remember in which year he had done it. He deliberately put his foot through it, tore away the strips of canvas from the frame and burned them. It was the only portrait of him in existence, since he had always refused to be photographed. In the line they had been forbidden to keep diaries or to make sketches, since either might be of use to the enemy if they got possession of them. He shut his eyes. In a flash he saw vividly the ruined village, the road leading to M——, the broken desecrated ground, the long slag-hill, and heard the “claaang” of the heavies dropping reverberantly into M——. He went to Elizabeth’s room to get a sheet of paper and a soft pencil to make a sketch of the scene. She had gone out. As he rummaged at her table, he turned over and could not help seeing the first lines of a letter in a handwriting unknown to him. The date was that of the day on which he had returned to England, and the words he could not help seeing were: “Darling, What a bore, as you say! Never mind, the visitation can’t last long and....” Winterbourne hastily covered the letter up to avoid reading any more.