y from home but they said it was all right; they only
wanted to look at a picture and would be very careful of everything. 'I
hope it is all right, sir,' the housekeeper concluded. 'The gentleman
says he's a sitter and he gave me his name--rather an odd name; I think
it's military. The lady's a very fine lady, sir; at any rate there they
are.'

'Oh, it's all right,' Lyon said, the identity of his visitors being
clear. The good woman couldn't know, for she usually had little to do
with the comings and goings; his man, who showed people in and out, had
accompanied him to the country. He was a good deal surprised at Mrs.
Capadose's having come to see her husband's portrait when she knew that
the artist himself wished her to forbear; but it was a familiar truth to
him that she was a woman of a high spirit. Besides, perhaps the lady was
not Mrs. Capadose; the Colonel might have brought some inquisitive
friend, a person who wanted a portrait of _her_ husband. What were they
doing in town, at any rate, at that moment? Lyon made his way to the
studio with a certain curiosity; he wondered vaguely what his friends
were 'up to.' He pushed aside the curtain that hung in the door of
communication--the door opening upon the gallery which it had been found
convenient to construct at the time the studio was added to the house.
When I say he pushed it aside I should amend my phrase; he laid his hand
upon it, but at that moment he was arrested by a very singular sound. It
came from the floor of the room beneath him and it startled him
extremely, consisting apparently as it did of a passionate wail--a sort
of smothered shriek--accompanied by a violent burst of tears. Oliver
Lyon listened intently a moment, and then he passed out upon the
balcony, which was covered with an old thick Moorish rug. His step was
noiseless, though he had not endeavoured to make it so, and after that
first instant he found himself profiting irresistibly by the accident of
his not having attracted the attention of the two persons in the studio,
who were some twenty feet below him. In truth they were so deeply and so
strangely engaged that their unconsciousness of observation was
explained. The scene that took place before Lyon's eyes was one of the
most extraordinary they had ever rested upon. Delicacy and the failure
to comprehend kept him at first from interrupting it--for what he saw
was a woman who had thrown herself in a flood of tears on her
companion's bos