"Working," Saumerez answered mechanically. "I have been working rather hard. Rather too hard. I don't think I have been asleep this year. Now I am trying a little exercise." The man he had met recommended him to try more particular remedies than that, and named a specialist for insomnia. But he found himself giving advice to strangers; for yards of greasy pavement, with its shifting freight of damp humanity, already separated him from Saumerez, whom he watched out of sight with a shrug, and put out of mind in five minutes. In Kensington Gardens a ground fog clung to the dingy grass, shrouding the trunks of trees whose tops were sharp enough against a merely colourless sky. It was the first afternoon that autumn when your breath smoked in the air. The use of the place on such a day was as a route, not a retreat, and Saumerez had no fellow loiterers. But ever through the fog the leaves floated softly to the ground--a meagre, unnoticeable shower, of no conceivable interest to anybody; yet Saumerez watched it attentively till the light failed, sitting the whole time on a seat that would have chilled to the bone any person in his proper senses. It was a seat, however, on which he remembered sitting with Sapphira once in the summer before she went away. He sat on now until a keeper in a cape stopped to tell him it was half-past five and he must go. He got up at once, and walked home; but God knows by what roundabout way; for when he reached his studio the moon was teeming into it through the top-light, and shining with all its weight on Sapphira as Saumerez had painted her. The eyes were on him from the moment he crossed the threshold; and still they seemed to smile; but he shut the door, and went up close, as he had gone a hundred times before, and gave them back a ghastly grin. "You devil!" he said quietly. "You little, lying devil!" And he said worse, but all so quietly. And as he swore and grinned he took out his pen-knife, and without looking at it ran his thumb over the blade and threw the knife away. It was too blunt for him. So he flung through the studio, upsetting with a crash a table laden with brushes and pipes and a soup-plateful of ashes, and clattered down the step into the bedroom which adjoined. The eyes were waiting for him when he came back with a lighted candle in his left hand and in his right an open razor, which he plunged with a curse into the brown slender throat. But still the eyes met his gaily, and for that, and because the canvas would not bleed, he slit and hacked at it until the wooden frame was empty, and the moon shining through showed the painted shreds of canvas on the floor.