There was still one picture at which he could work, which he had not looked at yet, nor even turned its easel round from the wall, and he stood for some time in front of it, unable apparently to make up his mind as to whether he would touch it or not. Then suddenly, with a sharp, ill-humoured sort of tug, he wheeled it round. Yes, this was why he could not touch Philip's portrait; here in front of him, dazzling and brilliant, stood that which came between him and it. And as he looked his eye cleared; it was as if a film, some material film, had been drawn away from over it, and he examined his work with eager, critical attention. Though ten minutes ago he could not paint, now he could not help painting. He starved for the palette; his hands ached for the slimy resistance of the paint dragged over the canvas. On the convex mirror, which was to be on the wall behind the girl, reflecting her back and the scarlet shimmering of her cloak, he had, like a child saving the butteriest bit of toast till the end, reserved for the end the big touches of light on the gilt frame. The more difficult, technical painting of the mirror itself he had finished, putting the reflections in rather more strongly than he wished them eventually to appear, for he knew, with the artist's prescience, exactly how the lights on the gold frame would tone them down. And it was with a smile of well-earned satisfaction that he put these in now; he almost laughed to see how accurately he had anticipated the result. Then, after some half-hour of ecstatic pleasure--for at this stage every stroke told--he stepped back and looked at it. Yes, that too was as he meant it--that too was finished. Slowly his eye dwelt next on the figure of the girl. Was Philip right after all? Did it indeed need nothing more? He felt uncertain himself. In ninety-nine other cases out of a hundred, if he had really not been certain, there was no one's judgment which he would have more willingly have deferred to than Philip's; but here he could not help connecting his insistence that nothing more should be done with the subsequent revelation that Madge did not wish to sit again to him. It was impossible to disconnect the two; coincidences of that sort did not happen. Then the whole world of colour, of drawing, of his own inimitable art, went grey and dead, and from its ashes rose, so to speak, the thought that filled the universe for him, Madge herself. What, in heaven's name, did it all mean? What had he done that she should treat him like this? Search as he might, his conscience could find no accusation against him; yet he could not either believe that this was a mere wilful freak on her part. Then, again, he had called two days ago at an hour when she was almost always in, and the man had not given him a "Not at home" direct; he had gone upstairs. He felt absolutely certain that she had been in and had refused to see him.