was a Sun-child, a creature of air and earth and fire, a daughter of Circe and Dionysus; and as he drained the so frankly offered philtre of her intoxicating beauty, and flung his whole soul’s response to it in glowing color upon the canvas, he felt that he would never again thus catch the fates asleep, or thus plunge his hands into the nectar of the supreme gods. The world presented itself to him at that moment, while he swept his brush with fierce passionate energy across the canvas, as bathed in translucent and unclouded ether. Everything it contained, of weakness and decadence, of gloom and misgiving, seemed to be transfigured, illuminated, swallowed up. He felt as though, in thus touching the very secret of divine joy, held in the lap of the abysmal mothers, nothing but energy and beauty and creative force would ever concern or occupy him again. All else,--all scruples, all questions, all problems, all renunciations--seemed but irrelevant and negligible vapour, compared with this glorious and sunlit stream of life. He worked on feverishly at his task. By degrees, and in so incredibly a short time that Gladys herself was astonished when he told her she could rest and stretch herself a little, the figure of the Ariadne he had seen in his imagination limned itself against the expectant background. He was preparing to resume his labour, and Gladys, after a boyish scramble into the neighbouring conservatory, and an eager return to the artist’s side with a handful of early strawberries, was just re-mounting the platform, when the door of the studio opened and Hugh Clavering entered. He had been almost inclined,--in so morbid a condition were his nerves--to knock at the door before coming in, but a lucky after-thought had reminded him that such an action would have been scandalously inappropriate. Assuming an air of boyish familiarity, which harmonized better perhaps with her leather-bound ankles than with her girlish figure, Gladys jumped down at once from the little stage and ran gaily to welcome him. She held out her hand, and then, raising both her arms to her head and smoothing back her bright hair beneath its circlet of bronze, she inquired of him, in a soft low murmur, whether he thought she looked “nice.” Clavering was struck dumb. He had all those shivering sensations of trembling agitation which are described with such realistic emphasis in the fragmentary poem of Sappho. The playful girl, her fair cheeks flushed with excitement and a treacherous light in her blue eyes, swung herself upon the rough oak table that stood in the middle of the room, and sat there, smiling coyly at him, dangling her sandalled feet. She still held in her hand the strawberries she had picked; and as, with childish gusto, she put one after another of these between her lips, she looked at him with an indescribable air of mischievous, challenging defiance.