She found a scrap of paper on the edge of the easel, on which paper were scribbled Sully Prudhomme’s exquisite little lines, _Si vous saviez_. The verse she had tried to illustrate was the one running: ‘Si vous saviez ce que fait naître Dans l’âme triste un pur regard, Vous regarderiez ma fenêtre Comme au hasard.’ ‘It is not very good,’ said Sara, apologetically; ‘it is a stupid, sentimental little thing after all.’ ‘As you have sketched it, it is,’ he answered, and said no more. Sara, with an uneasy thrill of feeling, remembered his words to her at Trockenau: ‘If I thought it atrocious, I am afraid I should say it was so, much though I might dislike having to do it.’ She felt that he had just now said ‘atrocious,’ or something very like it, and her heart sank. Silently she placed another canvas above the first. It was a vague, indistinct scene; what appeared some wild, wind-blown trees on rising ground to the left—clouds riven asunder, and silvered by a moon which did not actually appear; the hint of a deep, rapid, sullen stream, with tall rushes, in the foreground. ‘That is imaginary!’ he said abruptly, ‘You did not go to Nature for this.’ ‘No, not altogether. It is—it is only a sketch.’ ‘Scarcely that. Is it meant to typify anything?’ ‘I believe I was thinking of Shelley’s stanzas: “Away! the moor is dark beneath the moon!” But it is bad. I have failed,’ she added, a sudden sense of being very small and insignificant rushing over her, and also a conviction of how entirely she had failed. ‘Yes, you have failed,’ he answered, somewhat sarcastically. ‘I should not imagine, in the first place, that you knew what the lines meant.’ ‘No, I don’t think I do,’ Sara owned, deprecatingly. ‘Let us hope you never may. The meaning, when you come at it, is bitter—as bitter as anything well can be. Well’—he turned to her, and looked her in the face, with eyes which she felt were full of severity and full of concern—‘is that all?’ ‘It is all I can show you,’ she replied hastily, ‘when I see how displeased you are.’ ‘You are afraid of hearing the truth?’ asked Falkenberg, with a mocking smile. With compressed lips, and a face which had grown pale, she threw a cover from another canvas, a larger one, on a second easel, and, leaving him to study it, turned away, and stood at the window, looking out, her heart beating so wildly that its throbs deafened her. Yet she heard him say: ‘Ah! at least one knows what this is intended for.’