before everything, as he had said? Her tears came,
and after her tears a calm, in which she heard the beating of a heart
that was not her own, and felt the pulse of the divine Fate that moves
through human things.

Then she asked herself--Was Vincent right? What effect had this curious
experience really had on her painting? She felt no personal interest in
the answer, but she got up and went to the easel. Her portrait of
Vincent was finished--all but the right hand, that was still in outline.
It was strange. Ted's best work had begun with his head of Audrey. What
about her own? She saw through her tears that in all her long and
hateful apprenticeship to portrait-painting, nothing that she had ever
done could compare with this last. There was a new quality in it,
something that she had once despaired of attaining. And that was
character. She had painted the man himself, as she saw him. Not the
Vincent of any particular hour, but Vincent with the memory of the past,
and the hope of the future in his face. All the infinite suggestion and
pathos, the complex expression that life had left on it, was there. If
she had not loved Vincent--loved him not only as he was, but as he might
have been--would she have known how to paint like that? Although her
womanhood would never receive the full reward of its devotion, that debt
had been paid back to her art with interest. The artistic voice told her
that Vincent was wrong; that for her what women call love had meant
knowledge; that her strength would henceforth lie in the visible
rendering of character; and that work of such a high order would command
immediate success.

And the voice of her womanhood cried out in anguish--"All the success in
the world won't make up to you for the happiness you have missed."

There was no sitting the next day; for Vincent was in bed, ill, with
congestion of the lungs.

CHAPTER XXIII

There is a little village in North Devon, sheltered from the sea by a
low range of sand-hills that stretches for miles on each side of it. The
coast turns westward here, and no cliff breaks that line of billowy
sand; northward and southward it goes, with the rhythmic monotony of the
sea. The sand-hills are dotted with tufts of the long star-grass, where
the rabbits sit; inland they are covered with fine blades bitten short
by the sheep. Seaward lies the hard ribbed sand, glistening with salt,
and fringed with the white surf of the Atlantic.

On the coast,