Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded glass. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of painting, as nobody knew better than Maurice Durant. She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any cost, to make amends for pain. "If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it." "Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?" "It would give me pleasure if you would." "But isn't--might it not be valuable?" It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the more reason, if you like it----" "Like it? I should lo----" She drew back her breath. "No; I think I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the canvas down with a gesture of renunciation. "Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?" "I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the things I want to forget." "What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman. He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and fire. "What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want to see--the things----" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me so intolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can hardly bear to look at them." He glanced at the drawings. _He_ could hardly bear to look at them either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of longing. She took up the picture she had just laid down. "But _this_--it's not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world. It would bring it so horribly near me--don't you see?" He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered her eyelids. On to the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt. She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by a tumult of vision and desire. "If only I could get away--get away from this!" It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight. Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too. "And why not get away?" he asked gently.