She at last determined, in a sudden fury of daring, that she would endure it all no longer, crying out within herself that life owed her more than it was giving. As a result of that new spirit of audaciousness, she appeared early the next day at the studio of Repellier; yet even as she stepped into the familiar, high-ceilinged room she quailed inwardly, and found herself with little to say. She was dressed in a tightly fitting whip-cord gown--her eye for outward apparel had in no way dimmed--and on her breast she wore a huge bunch of English violets. Repellier's quick eye noticed that her cheeks were rouged, and that a touch of crimson had been added to her usually pale lips. During all her brief visit she appeared ill at ease--so ill at ease that the kind-hearted old Repellier did not have the courage to speak of anything but the lightest commonplaces, even showing her his newer canvases and, from his windows, pointing out to her the city muffled in rain. When she rose to say good-by he went with her to the door, wondering why she had not spoken, and marveling at the change in her. From his open door he gazed after her, musingly. It was at the top of the stairs that she turned hesitatingly back. "Mr. Repellier!" He waited for her to speak, though some subterranean medium seemed to carry her words to him before they were uttered. "Do you ever," she hesitated, "I mean have you ever heard anything of--of Mr. Hartley?" The picture of a humbled and half-wistful supplicant, of a woman withered and broken, weighed down by the monotony and starvation of an empty life, yet consumed by a still insatiable greed, of a being who had grown old unwillingly, clinging there weakly to his baluster-rail and looking back at him through the half-light of a gloomy hallway, photographed itself indelibly on Repellier's memory, as there flashed over him the incongruous image of Hanchett's new portrait of her, hung but a week before in the hall of the Southern Women's Club, where, he knew, she was to look down for all time from her great gilt frame, beautiful to the eye, frail and tender, mysteriously seductive, the drooping eyes luminous and mutely pleading, the mouth pensive, almost pathetically weak in its excess of timorous femininity, the proudly poised head weighed down with its heavy burden of golden-red hair, the whole figure touched with a fervor hinting at the inner fire consuming the all too frail flesh. It was Æschylean, Repellier felt, in its piercing irony. "Yes, I have heard from Hartley," he answered, slowly, as she raised a suddenly vivid face to him. "He has been ill, and alone, for weeks." "Ill!" she cried, in a hard, thin voice; and a baffled life seemed to ebb away with that one little cry. Through the half-lights the woman did not move.