Oliver laughed, returned the bow with a mock flourish, and began rolling down his shirt-cuffs; a thrill quivering through him--that thrill only felt by a painter when he is conscious that some work of his brush has reached the high-water mark of his abilities. For only the artist in him had been at work. What stirred him was not the personality of the Countess--not her charm nor beauty but the harmony of the colors playing about her figure: the reflected lights in the blue-black of her hair; the soft tones of the velvet lost in the shadows of the floor, and melting into the walls behind her; the high lights on the bare shoulder and arms divided by the severe band of black; the subdued grays in the fall of lace uniting the flesh tones and the bodice; and, more than all, the ringing note of red sung by the japonica tucked in her hair and which found its only echo in the red of her lips--red as a slashed pomegranate with the white seed-teeth showing through. The other side of her beautiful self--the side that lay hidden under her soft lashes and velvet touch, the side that could blaze and scorch and burn to cinders--that side Oliver had never once seen nor thought of. This may have been because, while his fingers worked on, his thoughts were somewhere else, and that he saw another face as he mixed his colors, and not that of the siren before him. Or it may have been that, as he looked into the eyes of the Countess, he saw too deeply into the whirlpool of passion and pain which made up the undercurrent in this beautiful woman's strange life. Not so the others. Many of whom were the most serious-minded of men where women were concerned. Crug--who, to quote Waller, had drifted into a state of mind bordering on lunacy--was so completely taken off his feet that he again led her ladyship by her finger-tips to the piano, and, with his hand on his heart, and his eyes upraised, begged her to sing for him some of the songs of her native land and in the tongue of her own people; the Countess complying so graciously and singing with such consummate taste and skill, throwing her soul into every line, that the men soon broke out in rounds of applause, crowding about her with the eagerness of bees around a hive--all except Waller and Oliver, who sat apart, quietly watching her out of the corners of their eyes. The portrait was forgotten now; so were the sketches and tiles, and the work of the evening. So was everything else but the woman who dominated the room. She kept her seat on the piano-stool, the centre of the group, as a queen of the ballet sits on a painted throne, flashing her eyes from one to the other, wheeling about to dash off an air from some unknown opera--unknown to those who listened--laying her lighted cigarette on the music-rack as she played, and whirling back again to tell some anecdote of the composer who wrote it, or some incident connected with its production in Vienna or Warsaw or St. Petersburg--the club echoing her every whim.