his richest and his best; he
drew for her scenes and things, not in their crude and temporary
form, but as they lived for him and for his art, idealized,
eternalized by the imagination that sees them as parts of the
immortal whole; and yet vivid, individual, drenched with the
peculiar color that made them equally and forever one with the soul
of Maurice Durant. She hardly seemed to heed, hardly seemed to
listen or to follow. She looked as if hearing were already absorbed
in sight.

Durant put a small oil painting into her hand. He had kept his
finest to the last. "If you're fond of the sea that may please you."

Mid-ocean, the slope and trough of a luminous sea; in the foreground
one smooth, high-bosomed, unbroken wave, the light flung off from
its crest like foam, to slide down its shoulder like oil on rounded
glass. On the sky-line the white peak of a sail; the whole a heaving
waste of wind and water, light and air. It was a consummate bit of
painting, as nobody knew better than Maurice Durant.

She looked at it as though she would never be tired of looking. A
sudden impulse seized him, a blind instinct to give pleasure at any
cost, to make amends for pain.

"If you honestly like it, I wish you'd keep it."

"Keep it? Keep it? Do you really mean it?"

"It would give me pleasure if you would."

"But isn't--might it not be valuable?"

It was valuable, as Durant reflected somewhat regretfully, but he
answered well. "Valuable chiefly to me, I fancy. Which is all the
more reason, if you like it----"

"Like it? I should lo----" She drew back her breath. "No; I think
I'd better not. Thank you very much, all the same." She laid the
canvas down with a gesture of renunciation.

"Now that's foolish. Why ever won't you?"

"I daren't. I daren't live with it. It would remind me of all the
things I want to forget."

"What things?" He felt that the question was cruel, it was probing
the very heart of pain. But his curiosity was too strong. The
fountains of the deep were breaking up; he knew that he had only to
give the word to witness an astounding transformation of the woman.
He had given the word. Her face was changing; it had taken on the
likeness of her foreign mother, intensified in its subtlety and
fire.

"What things? The things I want to do and can't; the things I want
to see--the things----" She stopped. "Do you know, I don't even like
to have those sketches of my mother's hanging about; they haunt me
so i