She looked up at him with the very expression he had so often imagined, the pretty air of unconsciousness, in which there was neither displeasure nor alarm; only an innocent surprise. It seemed to him as if he had acted this scene a hundred times before, and knew what the end was to be--so constantly had he acted it in his day-dreams, so often had he imagined its bitter termination. "Dangerous for you, trebly dangerous for me, because when you assume an interest in my work, a pride in my fame, you tempt me beyond my strength. You tempt me to say that which may make us strangers from the moment you leave this house to-day. My work and my fame are yours,--yours to trample under your feet if you please; for you have only to tell me to-morrow that my art is distasteful to you, and I, who have been the slave of art for five-and-twenty laborious years, will never touch a brush again. You have been fatally kind to me during the past few months, Mrs. Champernowne. You have admitted me to a friendship which must embitter the remainder of my existence--unless you are prepared to make that existence unspeakably happy. You must have expected this--or something like this. You could not imagine that I could see you day after day, and be with you week after week, without loving you, as I do love you; as I think only a man of my age and of my concentrated life can love." The widow sat with her face turned away from the painter, her eyes fixed on his picture. The soft folds of her cashmere shawl were slightly stirred by her hurried breathing, but her attitude was statuesque as the attitude of Dido herself. "I am very sorry," she said softly; "very, very sorry." "Sorry that I love you?" "I am sorry that you should speak so seriously." "How would you have me speak? How can you expect that I should be otherwise than serious? You must know that I love you--you must know that I have loved you ever since you first admitted me to your intimacy, ever since you first assumed a friendly interest in my career. Yours is too sympathetic a nature for the coquette's heartless ignorance. You could not have been unconscious of such love as mine." "I never dreamt that you felt so deeply. If--if I fancied sometimes that you valued my friendship more, far more than it was worth, I thought you were only like some of my other friends, who are pleased to think better of me than I deserve to be thought of; friends who pay me pretty compliments whenever they come to see me, and forget my existence half an hour after they have left my house. Why should you be so much more in earnest than they?" "You are only equivocating with me, Mrs. Champernowne; you must have known that I was in earnest."