eir base; and yet he could not, he
did not, cease to hope.

XI

Victoria was sitting to Delorme in a corner of the Italian garden. He
wished to paint her _en plein air_, and he was restlessly walking to and
fro, about her, choosing a point of view. Victoria was vaguely pleased by
the picturesqueness of his lion head set close on a pair of powerful
shoulders, no less than by the vivacity of his dark face and southern
gesture. He wore a linen jacket with bulging pockets, and a black
skullcap, which gave him a masterful, pontifical air. To Victoria's
thinking, indeed, he "pontified" at all times, a great deal more than was
necessary.

However she sat resigned. She did not like Delorme, and her preference
was all for another school of art. She had moreover a critical respect
for her own features, and she did not want at all to see them rendered by
what seemed to her the splashing violence of Delorme's brushwork. But
Harry had asked it of her, and here she was.

Her thoughts, moreover, were full of Harry's affairs, so that the
conversation between her and the painter was more or less pretence on her
part.

Delorme, meanwhile, was divided between the passion of a new subject and
the wrath excited in him by a newspaper article which had reached him at
breakfast.

"A little more to the left, please, Lady Tatham. Admirable! One moment!"
The scrabble of charcoal on paper.

Delorme stepped back. Victoria sat languidly passive.

"Did you read that article on me in _The Weekly_? The man's a
fool!--knows nothing, and writes like God Almighty. A little more full
face. That's it! I suppose all professions are full of these jealous
beasts. Ours is cluttered up with them--men who never sell a picture,
and make up by living on the compliments of their own little snarling
set. But, upon my word, it makes one rather sick. Ah, that's good! You
moved a trifle--that's better--just a moment!"

"I'm glad you let me sit," said Victoria absently. "I _stood_ to Whistler
once. It nearly killed me."

"Ah, Jimmy!" said Delorme. "Jimmy was a Tartar!"

He went off at score into recollections of Whistler, drawing hard all the
time.

Victoria did not listen. She was thinking of those sounds of footsteps
she had heard under her window at dawn, and passing her room. This
morning Harry looked as usual, except for something in the eyes, which
none but she would notice. What had he been doing all those hours? There
was nothing erratic