The next day was very fine, and the artist had perforce to go out and paint as usual. Mrs. Elles felt unutterably solitary. She could not walk as far as Brignal, but she could not expect Rivers to stop at home and neglect his picture in order to amuse her. She virtuously stayed upstairs on one floor, as she was recommended to do, until evening, but she was too restless to sit or lie still, and wandered about from one room of the old inn to another. There were three bedrooms on the first story, hers and Rivers’ and one unoccupied room whose floor was on a somewhat higher level than the others, up a tiny flight of stairs. She “changed the air,” as Mrs. Watson put it, by sitting in there some part of the morning, and once an irresistible impulse led her into the artist’s room, which was the most ascetic and the least comfortable of the three. She stayed a long while looking out of the window, gazing fondly at the view which must meet his eyes every morning as he lay in his bed. It was very nearly the same as that which met hers, naturally, since the two rooms adjoined. She noticed a chair, drawn between the dressing-table and the window. He sat there, she supposed, sometimes, and looked out. So would she. But she found herself looking in, not out. Her loving eyes gloated on all the details of his room; the little heap of sketch books on the corner of the dressing-table; the martyred pocket-handkerchief, stained all the colours of the rainbow, that he had used to dab his drawing with; and the razors, that he kept so sharp, wherewith to scrape down its surface, lying beside those devoted to his own use; the three mother o’ pearl studs placed neatly on the ledge of the looking-glass, beside the heap of pence he had last turned out of his pockets; the fair white china palettes that he made a point of washing out carefully with his own hands, and whereon it was now her adored occupation to “rub” the delicate proportions of each colour required during the day. All this curious intermixture of art materials and objects of personal use, so characteristic of the artist’s room, struck her sense of dramatic incongruity and pleased her. Then she leaned out over the sill in a dream of what never could be, and forgot herself. Half an hour elapsed. A slight rustle behind her warned her of the presence of Jane Anne, who, aggressively remarking, “I came to see to the blind,” established herself there with a needle and cotton and drove Mrs. Elles away, although to uninitiated eyes the blind seemed in very good order. She went into her own room and spent the afternoon there; she fell asleep, or she would have heard voices in the room below--the sitting-room she shared with Rivers.