“He pays to get rid of me!” Mrs. Elles had commented bitterly. She had up to the last moment believed in the existence in Mortimer’s heart of a latent love for her. She was a woman before whom every man must necessarily bow the knee, even her husband. She was now a little disillusioned. “Such a man should be glad to have such a wife as me, on any terms!” she observed to Egidia. “It is worse than quarrelling with one’s bread and butter; it is quarrelling with one’s culture, as well!” But it was painfully obvious that Mortimer Elles did not now set so high a value on the Muse who had for ten years honoured his fireside. These were the things that amused Egidia, and indemnified her for the trial of housing the delinquent, and being the recipient of her oft repeated confidences. She always thought, and spoke to Rivers, of Phœbe Elles as of a wayward foolish child, whose material interests they both had at heart, and of the impending divorce case as of a mere legal and technical difficulty into which the indiscretion and imprudence of this particular child had plunged herself, and her friends. “Pooh!” she said to Rivers, in an off-hand manner that was half assumed. “You don’t know what Love is, either of you! She talks of it, and you don’t, but you are both alike!” Rivers still used his old habit, the one Mrs. Elles had noticed, and suffered from, that of refusing to take up other persons’ speeches unless positively called upon to do so. He was working now against time, standing intent, mahl-stick and palette in hand, under the pale white globe of electric light, which dimly lit the whole vast studio, and concentrated itself upon his head, that was not so dark as it used to be. “The little fiend! She has managed to turn his hair grey!” Egidia said to herself as she stood near him, but not near enough to interfere with the free play of his brush-arm, and talked softly, and in a way calculated to make no direct demand on his attention. Mrs. Elles had learned that art, too, in the glades of Brignal. Rivers never looked round at Egidia, but continued to lay on touch after touch with unerring precision and mastery. He now and then stepped back a few paces, and glanced at her, just enough to avoid jostling her in his backward walk, but that was all. “Do you like Dr. André?” she asked suddenly. “Yes, well enough why?” “Because I think he admires Phœbe!” “Does he?” was the indifferent reply. “She is probably with him now--or at her lawyer’s.” Egidia spoke tentatively, as if she were consulting him as to her own line in countenancing the intimacy between the two. Perhaps a desire to ascertain Rivers’ own personal feelings on the subject of the little flirtation unconsciously influenced her. “There is no harm in André,” said Rivers decidedly. “And, poor little thing, it does her good to be taken out of herself!”