‘Ay, sad enough. But there are sadder things than for a career to be cut off by death. There is the palsy of self-satisfaction, which has virtually killed the very finest talent over and over again, while leaving the body as strong and flourishing as ever. Poor Goldmark was rather too much the other way. Nothing that he did ever satisfied him.’ ‘Then do you not think he had genius?’ asked Sara. ‘N——no—I cannot call his gift genius. It just fell short of the happy inspired audacity of genius. It was talent of the very highest order.’ ‘That was always my idea of him. Won’t his wife and children be rather badly off?’ ‘I am afraid they will. But Frau Goldmark is rather a stirring little woman. Something will be contrived for them, I doubt not.’ ‘Are you going? This has been a short lesson.’ ‘It has,’ he answered with the same ambiguous little fold in his forehead. ‘You have not supplied me with much material to teach upon this time. You must work, my dear child—work while it is to-day,’ he added earnestly. ‘Bear my words in mind. Work while it is to-day, and let nothing interfere, or you will have to repent your idleness in dust and ashes.’ With which, not waiting for any reply, he left her. Sara looked after him dreamily. ‘What does he mean?’ she speculated. ‘But I know. He finds a change in me; and I am changed, even to myself. Sometimes I think the old spirit has completely left me, and yet how can that be? It will all come right again, I suppose. But I wish—I wish it might be soon.’ She sighed as she put down her palette, and sat down before her easel in the chair which Wilhelmi had lately occupied, and, amid the profound stillness of the quiet afternoon, let her thoughts wander off there where now they were for ever straying. She was too much under the influence of her love for Wellfield to be able to reflect whether that influence were a good or a bad one. That said, all is said; it contains her mental history for the past two months, and accounts for the depression which stole over Wilhelmi’s face and into his keen eyes as he saw her; it accounts too for the nameless paralysis which had stolen the cunning from her right hand, and from her soul the ardent zeal for her art. She was Sara Ford still, but Sara Ford metamorphosed. Wilhelmi sorrowfully told himself one day that there was now more life and spirit in the water-colour sketches which _die Kleine_, as he called Avice Wellfield, made, than in those of his dearest pupil, of which but lately he had been so proud.