the hurly-burly. That
dark figure of conscious power struggling in the fetters of its own
belief in power, was a piece of sculpture they had neither time nor wish
to understand, having no taste for tragedy--for witnessing the human
spirit driven to the wall.

It was five o'clock before Miltoun left the Bridge, and passed, like an
exile, before the gates of Church and State, on his way to his uncle's
Club. He stopped to telegraph to Audrey the time he would be coming
to-morrow afternoon; and on leaving the Post-Office, noticed in
the window of the adjoining shop some reproductions of old Italian
masterpieces, amongst them one of Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus.' He had
never seen that picture; and, remembering that she had told him it was
her favourite, he stopped to look at it. Averagely well versed in
such matters, as became one of his caste, Miltoun had not the power of
letting a work of art insidiously steal the private self from his soul,
and replace it with the self of all the world; and he examined this
far-famed presentment of the heathen goddess with aloofness, even
irritation. The drawing of the body seemed to him crude, the whole
picture a little flat and Early; he did not like the figure of the
Flora. The golden serenity, and tenderness, of which she had spoken,
left him cold. Then he found himself looking at the face, and slowly,
but with uncanny certainty, began to feel that he was looking at the
face of Audrey herself. The hair was golden and different, the eyes grey
and different, the mouth a little fuller; yet--it was her face; the same
oval shape, the same far-apart, arched brows, the same strangely tender,
elusive spirit. And, as though offended, he turned and walked on. In
the window of that little shop was the effigy of her for whom he had
bartered away his life--the incarnation of passive and entwining love,
that gentle creature, who had given herself to him so utterly, for whom
love, and the flowers, and trees, and birds, music, the sky, and the
quick-flowing streams, were all-sufficing; and who, like the goddess
in the picture, seemed wondering at her own existence. He had a sudden
glimpse of understanding, strange indeed in one who had so little power
of seeing into others' hearts: Ought she ever to have been born into
a world like this? But the flash of insight yielded quickly to that
sickening consciousness of his own position, which never left him now.
Whatever else he did, he must get rid of tha