ble in this picture; her past and her future
were in this disconcerting compound of the commonplace and the rare;
and the confusion which this picture created in the minds of Owen's
friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution. Owen
admitted the drawing to be not altogether grammatical; one eye was a
little lower than the other, but the eyes were beautifully drawn--the
right eye, for instance, and without the help of any shadow.

"Look at the face," he said to Harding, "achieved with shadow and
light, the light faintly graduated with a delicate shade of rose."

He compared the face to a jewel the most beautiful in the world, and
the background to eighteenth-century watered silk.

"The painter conjures," Harding said, "and she rises out of that grey
background."

"Quite so, Harding."

Owen sat, his eyes fixed on the picture, his thoughts far away,
thinking that it would be better, perhaps, if he never saw her
again. Not to see her again! The words sounded very gloomy; for he
was thinking of his ancestors at Riversdale, in their tomb, and
himself going down to join them.

"I think, Asher, it is getting late; I must go now."

The friends bade each other good-night among the footmen who closed
the front door.

In his great, lonely bedroom, full of tall mahogany furniture, Owen
lay down; and he asked himself how it was that he had left America
without seeing her. His journey to America was one of the uncanniest
things that had ever happened in his life. Something seemed to have
kept him from her, and it was impossible for him to determine what
that thing was, whether some sudden weakening of the will in himself
or some spiritual agency. But to believe in the transference of human
thought, and that the nuns could influence his action at three
thousand miles distance, seemed as if he were dropping into some
base superstition. Between sleeping and waking a thought emerged
which kept him awake till morning: "Why had Evelyn returned to the
stage?" When he saw her last at Thornton Grange her retirement
seemed to be definitely fixed. Nothing he could say had been able to
move her. She was going to retire from the stage.... But she had not
done so. Now, who had persuaded her? Was it Ulick Dean? Were these
two in America together? The thought of Evelyn in New York with
Ulick Dean, going to the theatre with her, Ulick sitting in the
stalls, listening, just as he, Owen, had listened to her, became
unendurable;