“Mr. Rivers doesn’t paint figures, Miss,” said the woman kindly, and with the manner of one delivering an oft repeated statement. “But Mr. Brandard, over the other side of the Square, is always glad for us to send models over to him.” “I am not a model,” said Mrs. Elles, vexed and ashamed. “Here is my card. Will you take it to Mr. Rivers, and ask if he will see me?” The perfectly civil Scotchwoman took it, with a blank neutral face. She showed the visitor into a half vestibule, half room, on one side of the passage. It was perfectly ordered and arranged, there were no landscapes on its walls--it was, she knew, a fad of the painter’s not to hang his own pictures. There were other people’s pictures, etchings, engravings, with flattering inscriptions, “A mon ami--à mon confrère--hommages”--signed with some of the greatest names in the land. A sense of the worldly importance of this man whom she was going to drag through seas of disreputability grew in her mind, and affected her more deeply than Egidia’s hints and lectures had done. She was literally a burr hanging on this great name, and she ought to kill herself sooner than let herself be associated with it in men’s minds. It was then that the idea of suicide first came to her. The servant came back. “Mr. Rivers is very sorry indeed, Ma’am, but he is not able to see any one to-day.” “He---- ” Her lips trembled; her whole body shock at the blow. She turned, lest the woman saw her face. “Is there any message I can give, Madam?” “No, thank you, no message,” she answered, with her face still averted, and drifting out into the street. She leant against the palings of the Square, and sobbed. Was it love, or vanity--or shock? “How brutal--how brutal!” she repeated to herself. The policeman on his beat turned his bull’s eye on to her. “Are you going to tell me to move on?” she asked him, plaintively. “No, Madam,” he replied, and she was a little assuaged. At least he saw that she was a lady. She dried her eyes, and crossed back to the pavement, and down a side street. As she passed a little postern-like door in the wall--Rivers’ happened to be a corner house--it opened, and the artist came out. He still had her card in his hand. They stood and faced each other. “Oh, my God, how ill you look!” she exclaimed, “and it is all my fault. Won’t you even give me your hand?” “Are you mad?” he said, contemporaneously with her speech. “Good God! was there ever a more idiotic thing for a woman in your position to do?” He seized her arm, almost roughly, and led her away from the door. “What are you going to do with me?” “Put you in a cab, of course! You must not be seen here with me, on any account. I could hardly believe my eyes when your card was put into my hands.” So saying, he tore it across with a rancour that pierced her heart.