He went before her and stood in the entrance of the work-shop. When she had passed him into its interior, he casually closed behind them one of the rough folding doors. The contrast from the horizontal sun outside, turning the sandstone blocks into ruddy gold, to the shadowy twilight within, was strangely emphatic. He began to speak; saying he hardly knew what--some kind of stammered nonsense about the bases and capitals and carved mouldings that lay around them. But Gladys, true to her feminine prerogative, swept all this aside. With a bold audacity she began at once. “How nice to be alone and free, for a little while!” Then, moving still further into the shadow, and standing, as if absorbed in interest, before the rough beginnings of a fluted pillar which reached as high as the roof-- “What kind of top are you going to put on to that thing?” As she spoke she leant against the pillar with a soft, weary relaxation of her whole form. “Come near and tell me about it,” she whispered, as if her breath caught in her throat. Luke recognized the tone--the tone that said, so much more distinctly than words, “I am ready. Why are you so slow?” He came behind her, and as gently and lightly as he could, though his arms trembled, let his fingers slide caressingly round her flexible figure. Her breath came in quick gasps, and one hot small hand met his own and pressed it against her side. Encouraged by this response, he boldly drew her towards him. She struggled a little; a shy girlish struggle, more than half conventional--and then, sliding round in his arms with a quick feline movement, she abandoned herself to her craving, and embraced him shamelessly and passionately. When at last in sheer weariness her arms relaxed and she sank down, with her hands pressed to her burning cheeks, upon an unfinished font, Luke Andersen thought that never to his dying day would he forget the serpentine clinging of that supple form and the pressure of those insatiable lips. He turned, a little foolishly, towards the door and kicked with his foot a fragment of a carved reredos. Then he went back to her and half-playfully, half-amorously, tried to remove her hands from her face. “Don’t touch me! I hate you!” she said. “Please,” he whispered, “please don’t be unkind now. I shall never, never forget how sweet you’ve been.” “Tell me more about this work of yours,” she suddenly remarked, in a completely changed voice, rising to her feet. “I have always understood that you were one of our best workmen. I shall tell my father how highly I think of what you’re doing--you and your brother. I am sure he will be glad to know what artists he has among his men.”