the cold light, in
silver, in crystal, in faint, mixed delicacies of colour, almost as on a
pilgrim at a shrine. I don't know what it was in her--save, that is, the
positive pitch of delicacy in her beauty--that made her, so impressed
and presented, indescribably touching. She was like an awestruck child;
she might have been herself--all Greuze tints, all pale pinks and blues
and pearly whites and candid eyes--an old dead pastel under glass.

She was not too reduced to this state, however, not to take, soon
enough, her own precaution--if a precaution it was to be deemed. I was
acutely conscious that the naturalness to which I have just alluded
would be, for either party, the only precaution worth speaking of. We
moved slowly round the room, pausing here and there for curiosity;
during which time the two men remained where we had found them. She had
begun at last to watch them and had proposed that we should see in what
they were so absorbed; but I checked her in the movement, raising my
hand in a friendly admonition to wait. We waited then, face to face,
looking at each other as if to catch a strain of music. This was what I
had intended, for it had just come to me that one of the voices was in
the air and that it had imposed close attention. The distinguished
painter listened while--to all appearance--Gilbert Long did, in the
presence of the picture, the explaining. Ford Obert moved, after a
little, but not so as to interrupt--only so as to show me his face in a
recall of what had passed between us the night before in the
smoking-room. I turned my eyes from Mrs. Server's; I allowed myself to
commune a little, across the shining space, with those of our
fellow-auditor. The occasion had thus for a minute the oddest little air
of an aesthetic lecture prompted by accidental, but immense, suggestions
and delivered by Gilbert Long.

I couldn't, at the distance, with my companion, quite follow it, but
Obert was clearly patient enough to betray that he was struck. His
impression was at any rate doubtless his share of surprise at Long's
gift of talk. This was what his eyes indeed most seemed to throw over
to me--"What an unexpected demon of a critic!" It was extraordinarily
interesting--I don't mean the special drift of Long's eloquence, which I
couldn't, as I say, catch; but the phenomenon of his, of all people,
dealing in that article. It put before me the question of whether, in
these strange relations that I believed I ha