Evelyn had turned to shut the door as she spoke, but at this a sort of convulsive jerk went through him, and involuntarily he slammed it to. There was something of deadly appropriateness in the girl's words; indeed, there was a force in proximity to her outside her control. He could not even feel certain that it was within his own, whether he was able to stop the explosion. But her previous conduct to him, her refusal to sit again, her saying that he bored her, her refusal even to see him when he paid an ordinary call, were all counter-explosions, so to speak. The noise of the door that he had banged startled him not less than her. "I beg your pardon," he said. "I don't know how I did that. It flew out of my fingers, as servants say when they break something." The first slow, hot drops of rain that had been the leaking of the sluices of heaven, had given place to a downpour of amazing volume and heaviness. In the windless air the rain fell in perpendicular lines of solid water, as if from a million inexhaustible squirts, rattling on the roof like some devil's tattoo, and hissing loud in the hedge outside. The gurgling of the house gutters had increased to a roar, and every now and then they splashed over, the pipes being unable to carry away the water. But for the last few minutes there had been no return of the lightning, and the air was already a little cooler and fresher, the tenseness of its oppression was a little relieved. And in proportion to this Madge again rather recovered herself. "I really am most grateful to you, Mr. Dundas," she said, "for your arrival. I don't know what I should have done here alone. Did you come down from London this morning?" Evelyn drew a chair near her and sat down. "Yes, I settled to come quite suddenly," he said. "I had meant to work all day, and I did for half an hour or so, but everything else looked ugly, I could not see either colour or form properly...." "Everything else?" said Madge unsuspectingly; his phrase was ambiguous; she did not even distantly guess what he meant. "Yes, everything else, except my portrait of you," he said shortly. There was a pause of unrivalled awkwardness, and the longer it lasted the more inevitable did the sequel become. "I must ask you something," said Evelyn at length. "I ask it only in common justice. Do you think you are treating me quite fairly in refusing to sit for me again? For I tell you plainly, you cheat me of doing my best. And when one happens to be an artist of whatever class, that is rather a serious thing for anybody to do. It means a lot to me."