all her old traditions had become
odious to her, seeming, for the moment, deeply tainted with
dishonour, and partly the cause of her disastrous plight. A great,
ruining wave had broken over her life, and in her passionate
helplessness she cried only for some firm and absolute shore, else
the silence of the engulfing waters, not for the vain ropes of
social convention with which they would drag her back into the
perilous security from which she had been swept; and she had
forgotten everything but her imperative need, which had brought her
there, when the lodging-house drudge returned and ushered her
clumsily into Oswyn's presence.

It was a sitting-room on the second floor which the artist occupied,
by no means an uncomfortable apartment, though Eve's first
impression of it was immeasurably sordid, and she realized, with a
touch of pity, that the painter's difficult genius had no tact of
application to his surroundings.

Had, then, the painter of "Thanatos the Peacebearer"--that
incomparable work!--no personal taste, to be violated by the crude
wall-paper and the vulgar vases, containing impossible flowers,
which jostled against broken tobacco-pipes and a half empty bottle
of milk on the mantelpiece?

There was an immense untidiness everywhere; a disorder of children's
toys and torn picture-books would have prepared Eve for the
discovery of a sleeping child with brilliant hair coiled up in a rug
on the sofa, if her eyes had not been arrested by an unframed canvas
on an easel, the only picture, save some worthless prints in common
gilt frames, which was visible. It was the head of Philip Rainham,
immortalized by the brush of his friend, which awaited her--the eyes
already closed, the pale lips still smiling with that superbly
ironical smile of the dead.

She had not greeted Oswyn on her entrance, and now she had ceased to
remember that he was there, as she stood contemplating the portrait
with her rapt and sorrowful gaze, while Oswyn, leaning across the
table, implicitly accepting the situation, which had to him all the
naturalness of the unexpected, considered her in his turn.

He had never before seen her to such advantage, and, remembering
that early presentment of her which Lightmark had exhibited in the
Grosvenor, he realized how much she had developed. The singular
nobility and purity of her beauty amazed him; it shone out like the
starry night; and, standing there remote and silent (in her
abstraction she