night over his drawing-board or at his easel during the day; he had only to look up to meet the soft eyes he loved; and sometimes, when long hours had tangled his nerves, to surprise a kind smile on the red lips and to fancy the sweet sunburnt throat swelling with warm breath. At such moments he would go and stand, until he ached again, before the portrait that was making him work desperately but not well--and think--and think--and even pray to Sapphira for pluck and power, as to a painted Virgin. But he had made to himself a kinder face than he was ever to see any more in the flesh. For when Sapphira came back in September it was to get rid of her flat at the end of the quarter; and when he went to say good-bye to her she informed him--with considerable agitation, it is true, but yet with a firmness and decision about which there could be no mistake--that she must give him up too. In the condition to which Saumerez had reduced himself by overwork and worry, a scene was to be expected, and he made one that frightened dreadfully the author of all this misery; yet she bore it with such a disarming humility and so many and bitter self-reproaches that the wronged man's heart softened hopelessly before he left her. Thus they parted with tears on both sides, and on his the most passionate vows he had ever made her: just because she had told him how she honoured and admired him above all men, among whom, simply, she found there was none she could "really love." Now mark the mischief of this assurance. To Saumerez it was food and drink and sleep for many days. From an only consolation it grew into a last hope. Then the hope began to importune for expression, and that crescendo, until Saumerez sat down at last and made a full and final outpouring of his soul to Sapphira, and charging her not to answer until her heart was changed, turned to his tools with relief, and began excellently by destroying the abortive "masterpiece." However, an answer came with startling promptitude. And Saumerez would have done well to open it without first pondering the superscription in the dear familiar hand, that danced through his starting tears, and without wasting time in fond and fatuous speculations; for the answer was, what Sapphira had hoped to spare him "for a long, long time"--namely, that she was already engaged to someone else--meaning the excellent man she married before the year was out. But it was still early in October when the affair took its final turn, so far as Saumerez was concerned. In the raw afternoon of that same day he was seen in Piccadilly, walking west. His dark eyes were sunken and lack-lustre; an inky stubble covered the lower part of his face without hiding the hollows of his cheeks; and he was for passing a moderately close acquaintance with no more than a nod, but this the other would not allow. "I say, Saumerez," cried he, "in God's name, what have you been doing?"