Frank paused, and Margery knew that her telegram would be useless. The matter was between herself and Frank. If help could reach him it must come from her. In a moment she understood all. The vague fear, the disconnected hints, the thing he had wished to tell her once at New Quay, and once again that morning, the guilty face, her own shrinking, formed links of a connected chain. She had shrunk from what was evil, as Frank had shrunk from it and loathed it when she was there; but the fascination of which, interpreted by his artistic passion, he had been unable to resist. His own skill had raised the thing that he had thought was dead into new life, and now it asserted its old supremacy. In a few moments he spoke again. "Do you see how like we are?" he said, speaking slowly, as if he had some difficulty in finding words. "No wonder you mistook it for me. You cannot see it properly in this light; in the daylight the likeness is even more extraordinary. Is it not clever of me to have painted such a picture? There is no picture like it in the world. It must go to the Academy next year, Margery, as a posthumous work. It is a creation. I have made a man!" Frank paused, but Margery said nothing. "There were some things about me you did not know before--things which were part of me, and had been vital to me," he went on. "Once or twice I wished to tell you of them, but you would not hear. Now you see them. I think you cannot help seeing them. You can see them in the portrait's face and in mine--clearest in mine; but to-morrow they will be quite as clear in the other. They say that hearing firing brings corpses to the surface. I dare say it is true--at any rate, I have brought corpses to the surface. They are not pretty; corpses seldom are." Margery came a step nearer to him, though her flesh cried out against it. "Frank! Frank!" she said. "Wait a moment," said he. "I wish to tell you more. A critic has no right, as I said, to criticise unless he knows more about the picture than the artist, but the artist may criticise his own picture. This is my picture--all mine. And it is me. It is all true. Do you remember last Sunday, Margy, when Greenock read about the judgment books being opened, and every man being judged by what was written in them? By-the-way, Mrs. Greenock writes sonnets. He said she was an accomplished sonneteer. Well, do you know what those books are? They are nothing else than the faces, the real faces, of the men who are being judged. What chance do you think I shall have, for that is my book you see painted there--an illuminated manuscript. Why did you wish me to do it so much? Can you read it all? Can you see the Café Chantant in it? Can you see Paris, and the cruelty and the sweetness and bitterness of it? Can you see Claire in it, petite Claire, and the end, the whole of it, the pleasure, the weariness, the--the morgue? Yes, that was where I saw her last." "No, Frank, no," said Margery; "don't tell me."