It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair cutting into the center of her forehead. The mouth struck a note of life with its dull, soft red. There was not lacking in this young face the slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty. Sheila had a strange, arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing. Her eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness--indescribable eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and slender, arched black brows. Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat and looked at Hudson. Then she got to her feet. She was soft and silken, smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin. She had put on an old black dress, just a scrap of a flimsy, little worn-out gown. A certain slim, crushable quality of her body was accentuated by this flimsiness of covering. She looked as though she could be drawn through a ring--as though, between your hands, you could fold her to nothing. A thin little kitten of silky fur and small bones might have the same feel as Sheila. She stood up now and looked tragically and helplessly at Hudson and tried to speak. He backed away from the bed, beckoned to her, and met her in the other half of the room so that the leather screen stood between them and the dead man. They spoke in hushed voices. "I had no notion, Miss Arundel, that--that--of--this," Hudson began in a dry, jerky whisper. "Believe _me_, I wouldn't 'a' thought of intrudin'. I ordered the picture there from your father a fortnight ago, and this was the day I was to come and give it a last looking-over before I came through with the cash, see? I hadn't heard he was sick even, much less"--he cleared his throat--"gone beyond," he ended, quoting from the "Millings Gazette" obituary column. "You get me?" "Yes," said Sheila, in her voice that in some mysterious way was another expression of the clear mistiness of her eyes and the suppleness of her body. "You are Mr. Hudson." She twisted her hands together behind her back. She was shivering with cold and nervousness. "It's done, you see. Father finished it." Hudson gave the canvas an absent glance and motioned Sheila to a chair with a stiff gesture of his arm. "You set down," he said. She obeyed, and he walked to and fro before her. "Say, now," he said, "I'll take the picture all right. But I'd like to know, Miss Arundel, if you'll excuse me, how you're fixed?" "Fixed?" Sheila faltered. "Why, yes, ma'am--as to finances, I mean. You've got some funds, or some relations or some friends to call upon--?" Sheila drew up her head a trifle, lowered her eyes, and began to plait her thin skirt across her knee with small, delicate fingers. Hudson stopped in his walk to watch this mechanical occupation. She struggled dumbly with her emotion and managed to answer him at last.