ooked simply as if Lyon's question could not be serious.
'For the love of sitting to you? My dear fellow, if I had thought of it
I would!'

'Nor you either?' the painter demanded of Mrs. Capadose.

Before she had time to reply her husband had seized her arm, as if a
highly suggestive idea had come to him. 'I say, my dear, that
woman--that woman!'

'That woman?' Mrs. Capadose repeated; and Lyon too wondered what woman
he meant.

'Don't you remember when we came out, she was at the door--or a little
way from it? I spoke to you of her--I told you about her.
Geraldine--Grenadine--the one who burst in that day,' he explained to
Lyon. 'We saw her hanging about--I called Everina's attention to her.'

'Do you mean she got at my picture?'

'Ah yes, I remember,' said Mrs. Capadose, with a sigh.

'She burst in again--she had learned the way--she was waiting for her
chance,' the Colonel continued. 'Ah, the little brute!'

Lyon looked down; he felt himself colouring. This was what he had been
waiting for--the day the Colonel should wantonly sacrifice some innocent
person. And could his wife be a party to that final atrocity? Lyon had
reminded himself repeatedly during the previous weeks that when the
Colonel perpetrated his misdeed she had already quitted the room; but he
had argued none the less--it was a virtual certainty--that he had on
rejoining her immediately made his achievement plain to her. He was in
the flush of performance; and even if he had not mentioned what he had
done she would have guessed it. He did not for an instant believe that
poor Miss Geraldine had been hovering about his door, nor had the
account given by the Colonel the summer before of his relations with
this lady deceived him in the slightest degree. Lyon had never seen her
before the day she planted herself in his studio; but he knew her and
classified her as if he had made her. He was acquainted with the London
female model in all her varieties--in every phase of her development and
every step of her decay. When he entered his house that September
morning just after the arrival of his two friends there had been no
symptoms whatever, up and down the road, of Miss Geraldine's
reappearance. That fact had been fixed in his mind by his recollecting
the vacancy of the prospect when his cook told him that a lady and a
gentleman were in his studio: he had wondered there was not a carriage
nor a cab at his door. Then he had reflected that they would hav