peak. So she carried the huge picture out of his sight.

The next day, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, Hudson called. He
came with stiff, angular motions of his long, thin legs, up the four
steep, shabby flights and stopped at the top to get his breath.

"The picture ain't worth the climb," he thought; and then, struck by the
peculiar stillness of the garret floor, he frowned. "Damned if the feller
ain't out!" He took a stride forward and knocked at Arundel's door. There
was no answer. He turned the knob and stepped into the studio.

A screen stood between him and one half of the room. The other half was
empty. The place was very cold and still. It was deplorably bare and
shabby in the wintry morning light. Some one had eaten a meager breakfast
from a tray on the little table near the stove. Hudson's canvas stood
against the wall facing him, and its presence gave him a feeling of
ownership, of a right to be there. He put his long, stiff hands into his
pockets and strolled forward. He came round the corner of the screen and
found himself looking at the dead body of his host.

The nurse, that morning, had come and gone. With Sheila's help she had
prepared Arundel for his burial. He lay in all the formal detachment of
death, his eyelids drawn decently down over his eyes, his lips put
carefully together, his hands, below their white cuffs and black sleeves,
laid carefully upon the clean smooth sheet.

Hudson drew in a hissing breath, and at the sound Sheila, crumpled up in
exhausted slumber on the floor beside the bed, awoke and lifted her face.

It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair
cutting into the center of her forehead. The mouth struck a note of life
with its dull, soft red. There was not lacking in this young face the
slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty. Sheila had a strange,
arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing. Her
eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with
smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness--indescribable
eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and
slender, arched black brows.

Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat
and looked at Hudson. Then she got to her feet. She was soft and silken,
smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin. She had put on an old black
dress, just a scrap of a flimsy, little worn-out gown. A certain sli