"I have never been so near to you before."

Then a flood of feeling swept over her, and she would have knelt to him, her other self; but he was already at her feet, moved by that same instinct to do homage to the human form which held his counter soul, and on her white feet he laid a reverent embrace.

Strengthened and uplifted by that mystic union whose memory should never leave her, whose bonds should ever bind her, was Millicent. In every existence comes one supreme, all-important moment, which thenceforth is the landmark by which life is measured; the climacteric point to which the past merely served to lead, the future availing only to enshrine its memory. To some men and women the significance of that moment is known only when it has long pa.s.sed; to Millicent, the knowledge that her whole after life should be controlled by that hour was not wanting. And her lover,--would he be faithful to that unspoken vow? The thought never crossed her mind; she was irrevocably bound to him; priest and rite could but make a poor, earthy contract between what was mortal in them both; the spiritual union was not for this world, and might not be broken by either.

CHAPTER XIV.

"Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned.

The soul, doubtless, is immortal--where a soul can be discerned."

It was a pitiful story which the little journal had made known to John Graham,--the story of a woman grievously wronged, cruelly deceived.

Millicent Almsford's life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up the _livres defendus_ of his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie's. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life.

Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own.

Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the color of an exaggerated cynicism, which was sometimes strongly shaken by the inner spirit which still slept under the untouched heart.

Platonics, where the man is of the world wise, and the woman foolish with the innocence of childhood, are dangerous things, as he knew full well, and she did not. In pointing out the forces which mould the lives of men and women, what theme is so often upon the lips of two life students of opposite s.e.xes as that of love? To the girl it seemed a strange, rather interesting force, whose power it would not be unpleasant to test; and when one day her mentor confessed to her that she had bound him irrevocably by those bonds which he had taught her were but ropes of sand, she smiled half sadly, but in her heart laughed with childish merriment. She now should see the actual workings of that strange hallucination; she should learn something of what love was. She was as unfeeling as a young lioness, and learned the lesson of making him turn pale and red by turns, as quickly as she had learned the knack of touching the chords of her mandolin. She looked upon her quondam friend in the light of an invalid, suffering from a dangerous but non-contagious malady. And so things went on; the man gaining every day a firmer hold over the girl, intoxicated by the new power in herself and a growing consciousness of her beauty and charms. During the long mornings at the Palazzo Fortunio, the two friends read and talked together, while the Italian governess, understanding no word of their intercourse, sat sewing patiently beside them. In the cool afternoons, when they were rowed by the strong-armed gondolier, Girolomo, out into the glory of the sunset, the same stolid companion always accompanied them. One day, Mr. Almsford, selfish old epicurean, perceived for the first time that his daughter had grown to a tall and fair womanhood.

His attention had, perhaps, been first called to the fact by the increasing size of the half-yearly coffer which found its way from Fashion's capital to the Fortunio Palace, and by the proportionate lengthening of the account which accompanied it. Yes, Millicent was certainly grown to be a young lady. They were beginning to send her little, demure bonnets, and close-fitting, simple woollen dresses, made with more of an idea of displaying her graceful figure than heretofore.

The girl was heiress to her mother's fortune; and it behooved him to see about finding a suitable husband for her. Whom should he consult in this matter, but their most intimate friend; the man who seemed at once his contemporary and hers; the handsome, clever fellow-countryman, who had been on the most intimate footing in his house for the last ten years? Edward Holworthy had started unaccountably when, in the midst of one of the solemn pauses of their game of chess, Mr. Almsford had propounded the unexpected question to him:--

"How shall I find Millicent a husband?"

The elder gentleman, for the first time in many months, checkmated his adversary in two moves, and won the game in an unprecedentedly short s.p.a.ce of time.

Holworthy's advice was given after a week's deliberation. It was in favor of sending Miss Almsford to her father's sister, who lived in London, in order that she might be presented at court and introduced to English society. Mr. Almsford thought over the advice, which appeared to him wise. He consulted Millicent, who eagerly accepted the chance to see something of the world; and finally, after six months' exchange of letters upon the subject, the girl was taken to London by her father, and comfortably established, with her aunt, in a pretty Kensington villa, for which her poorly circ.u.mstanced relative gladly forsook a small house in an unfashionable quarter of the town. Having married a younger son of a great house, with no portion but debts on his part and beauty on hers, Millicent's aunt, with the matchless tact of our countrywomen, had secured herself a prominent and agreeable position in London society. In mere worldly advantages the young girl could have had no better chaperone than the pretty young woman, still occupied with bets, beaux, and bon-bons. She took her niece to all the best houses; and soon Millicent's extreme beauty, and the widely noised, somewhat exaggerated accounts of her worldly goods, brought her scores of invitations and admirers on her own account.

Six months after her departure, Millicent Almsford returned to the Palazzo Fortunio, where the report of her great social success had preceded her and tickled the ears of her parent, proud of the child for whose sake he had never sacrificed a whim of his own. Edward Holworthy, who had accompanied the father and daughter to London, and remained there during the period of the latter's stay, did not return to Venice, but sailed for Australia, from whence he never returned either to his native or to his adopted country. The change which her half year's absence had wrought in Millicent, her father attributed to her social experience. She had left him half a child, with a thousand absurd, whimsical ways, which had amused him, and endeared her to him more than any other trait in her character. Few things diverted him; and he counted every laugh which Millicent provoked from him as a positive good, which he set down to her credit in their joint account. Her stay in London had given Millicent a certain poise and manner which suited her marvellously well; but all the sparkle and freshness seemed to have left her. She was like a fresh, white lily which has been broken and wilted by a violent storm of wind and rain. For months she never smiled. Her life seemed to have come to a standstill; she suffered dumbly, hopelessly, with sad, deep eyes, made more beautiful by the trouble in them. A sceptic and a materialist, she found nothing in this world worth suffering for, and smiled incredulously when the old cure, her Latin teacher, tried to help her from the slough of earthly despair by promises of a glorious future, for whose attainment the life-battle should be bravely fought. She was conscious of no ethereal essence which should outlive the graceful body, whose beauty she sometimes cursed.

Did it not reduce her to the level of all hunted creatures? Was she not a thing to be pursued by men, like a tall deer or a fleet, timid hare?

"Something had come to the Signorina," said Girolomo, the gondolier; "and the Signor Holworthy, where was he?" And he shook his head gravely, the wise old creature, guessing, as did no other soul, that Edward Holworthy was in some way connected with Millicent's changed face and listless demeanor.

Something had come to her; but she never confided to priest or friend the trouble which robbed her young face of its childish curves, which killed the youth in her, and made her a woman in grief, while she was still a child in years. Only one confidant had she,--the little journal; the gold-clasped tome which all those years after had fallen into John Graham's hands. The story of the first pa.s.sion she had ever roused, read by the only man she had ever loved.

It was the pitiful story of a grievous wrong which had darkened more than one life. The miserable consequences of a wicked act are infinite; its influence spreads wider and wider every day, like the broadening rings which circle on the surface of a still pool disturbed by a stone which a careless hand has tossed. The black deed may be hidden from the sight of men, but its baleful effects are felt afar off in the lives of those who have known nought of its perpetration. Let not the sinner comfort himself in that his soul alone is d.a.m.ned for his crime. It darkens innocent lives with its evil; and in sinning against himself he sins against mankind.

In the strange country whither Millicent had gone, Holworthy was the only link which bound her to her home, the one being who understood and cared for her. The dominion which he had always held over her was now strengthened into a powerful magnetic force. The little journal told how that influence had been exerted in compelling her to a secret marriage against her own will and judgment. She had been tricked into an elopement,--it might better be called an abduction,--and all unwillingly became his wife. Then all too soon, ere a week had pa.s.sed, came the terrible discovery that the marriage was no marriage. For then came to her the mother of the man whom she was striving to love with wifely duty, an old woman, bowed with grief and years. She had come very far, across half a continent, to break to the girl whose name she had heard linked with that of her only son, the news that he was not free to marry, that she must give him up. When the tall girl with the childish, flower face fell stricken to the earth like a broken lily, at the feet of the older woman, she had made no cry; in the hours that followed, she said no word. When the man who had wrecked her life came and knelt beside her, prayed her to be patient and her wrongs should be righted, spoke of his remorse, told her of his terrible mad wife from whom the law would set him free, and make him really hers, prayed, besought, and worshipped at her feet, she answered him with one terrible word only. She rose and stood before him white and cruel in her agony, relentless as Fate.

"Go!" was the one syllable which her frozen lips uttered; and with a gesture of command, majestic and beautiful, she had banished him from her presence. The secret was kept, even from the old woman, grown more sorrowful at the sight of the girl's dumb agony and of her son's grief, which she could not soothe. The secret was kept; and that very night Millicent's face, pale and clouded, shone out amidst a group of fair women who sat languidly chatting through the music of _Faust_ at the opera. He kept her secret, poor wretch, and shielded her as best he might, forcing her to speak to him and see him before others, that no sudden breaking of their relations might be remarked. Save in the world, she never saw him again. That one word of command was the last syllable which he ever heard her speak to him directly. Not without a struggle did he give her up, but she was implacable. She yielded to him, and played her part in the little comedy which the world thought it understood. The beautiful Miss Almsford had found Holworthy a pleasant admirer, but her delicate American beauty and her solid American fortune would certainly win her a higher place in the world than that of the wife of Mr. Edward Holworthy, her countryman and old friend.

Youth and health are great physicians; and as the years pa.s.sed, Millicent recovered something of her old spring and elasticity. She was infinitely more interesting, if something colder and harder, than she had been in the old days. Her unquenchable vigor of temperament came to her help, and gave her a keen pleasure in her studies and in the work and thought of the people about her. Always self-reliant, she grew to live entirely without support from man or woman. She was a friend to many people, but was herself friendless. The Palazzo Fortunio, under her reign, grew to be the centre of a charming social circle. Musicians and painters were made welcome by the young hostess. At once an artist and a patron of the arts, she stood in a peculiar relation to the men who frequented her _salon_. If she had been without fortune she would have made music her profession. As it was, she studied it as faithfully as if self-support had been her aim; and she claimed that sympathy from her artistic friends which a mere connoisseur, be he ever so enthusiastic, can never arouse. To her small world she was all-important. Her sympathy helped many a timid _debutante_, and her counsel cheered the black days of more than one disheartened artist.

Always gracious and kind, she had drawn about her a group of people, to all of whom she was a sort of exalted fellow-worker, who knew but the poetry of art, and helped them to forget its prose. Her heart was quite empty, but her mind was keenly interested and fully occupied by the men and women among whom she lived. Happiness she had forgotten to look for, but in enjoyment her days were not wanting. It was a terrible blow to her when this pleasant, quiet life was suddenly broken up by her father's marriage. To her imperious nature the presence of the inferior woman whom Mr. Almsford had brought home to the Palazzo was intolerable.

Where could she go? For the first time in her life she felt the power which her fortune gave her. She could establish herself wherever she liked. Her father's sister proposed a repet.i.tion of their joint establishment in London, but at the very mention of her returning to England Millicent's face blanched. She would never again set foot in that country. It was while she was in a state of doubt concerning her future movements that her half-brother wrote her a long and affectionate letter, urging her to come and dwell for a time among his people, to visit her mother's country before she decided the important question of where she should establish herself for life. The idea seemed a just one to her; and acting on a tender impulse roused by the loving words of her unknown brother, she had telegraphed her departure, and forthwith started on her long journey accompanied by her capable French maid. The Abigail discharged her trust faithfully, as far as San Francisco, from which city she turned her face on the very day of her arrival, unwilling to remain longer in what she called "_le plus triste pays du monde_."

If the truth could have been known, Millicent would have signed away ten years of her life to have gone back with the woman to the Old World, the only home she had ever known.

Graham had not been mistaken when he predicted to Millicent that she would grow more in sympathy with the race from which she drew her inheritance of character and temperament than at first seemed possible.

Nature is stronger than habit, well called second nature; and as the surface roughness became familiar to her, she began to feel the strong life and vigor of the young Western land quickening her pulses and stimulating her whole being. The poverty of intellectual intercourse was more than compensated by the tremendous power of work, the electrical force which accomplishes so rapidly in this new land what in other countries has been the slow growth of centuries.

An answering glow of enthusiasm flushed her with hope, with a keener, fuller, more intense life than she had ever known before. She had clung at first to her traditions, and fought against the tide which seemed to be sweeping this people on and on and ever on. But nature was too strong for habit; her upright, fearless mind acknowledged kinship with these hard-working men and women, to whom pleasure is not save in toil, whose whole life is one long unconscious sacrifice to their country. On the eastern margins of our land the austere simplicity and purity have become infested with plague-spots brought--ay, imported with care and expense--from the Old World, and fostered like exotics on the clean soil. But from the great Western prairie comes a fresh, strong breeze which sweetens all the foulness of the Atlantic cities, and makes the breath of Columbia still pure and fragrant.

With this new sentiment for her new-found country came the first pa.s.sionate love to the heart of the beautiful and unhappy young woman.

She had breathed the spicy air of the Californian forests, bracing and sweet, and her cheek had grown fuller and fairer in the perfect climate.

Her empty, hollow heart was filled by a great love and strength, all-sustaining and soothing.

When Graham had first seen her lying in the fire-light, with cool, deep eyes, before the light of love had dawned in her flower face, she had seemed to him like a perfect white rose. Then the rose flushed palely, as the love-light trembled to a flame; and he brought her flowers of the color of the sea-sh.e.l.ls, and she wore them in her hair. Last of all, he laid at her feet deep-red damask rosebuds; and these she placed on her white breast, where they bloomed and died in a single night. He had painted her by the waves, as he had once seen her on that strange day when death had seemed so near and life so beautiful. He had painted her standing at the sea edge with pallid roses in her little hands, her graceful head set about with the same soft-hued flowers, and a single crimson rose lying lightly over her heart. He had hung the sketch against the wall where the sunlight fell upon it early in the morning; and Millicent had bade him remember, while he slept or waked, that she was near him.

CHAPTER XV.

"It cannot be that love so deep as mine Could fail to stay you like ethereal wine."

When he first understood the full import of the dreadful story, John Graham had been dazed with grief. He had sought distraction from his torturing thoughts in action, and had spent that first day in wandering through the forest. When he lay down to sleep that night in the lodge, his heart was burdened with the double weight of Millicent's secret and Millicent's deceit. He said to himself that they had put an insuperable bar between her and himself. He could have pardoned the disgrace which had befallen her, and was not her fault, but he could never forgive her deceit toward him. The finding of her kerchief the next morning, and the terrible apprehension which the blood-stain had aroused in him, swept away the anger and sorrow from his heart, leaving nothing there but an agonizing fear. This had been, in turn, banished by the joy of finding her alive and unharmed, waiting for him amidst the roses. The great fear had softened the anger in his heart; the sudden happiness exalted his soul from the h.e.l.l of anguish in which it had dwelt, into a perfect and pure peace. Pride, anger, and resentment were swept away, and love swayed him with its mastery. He knew her now, faulty as she was; and his higher nature forgave her, because of her great love, because of her great wrong. But in his stormy breast the tide of feeling flowed and ebbed; pride had reigned there so long that love could not all at once claim undisputed sway. He could not learn in an instant that pride is born of h.e.l.l, while love is breathed from heaven.

In that strange moment when their two beings had seemed etherealized, he had forgiven her all; but in the days that followed, pride, doubt, and prejudice came forward one by one to do combat with victorious love. It might be that they would conquer in the struggle; it might even be that pride, being selfish, should make him doubt and finally even forget love, which is unselfish. But he had pardoned her, and loved her with all her sins; he had acknowledged that bond of spirit which made them one; he had knelt before her and kissed her feet in a pa.s.sionless embrace full of reverence. No matter what griefs should fall upon her, no matter what deed or word of his might put them apart in this world, she should carry through her life, and beyond it, the knowledge that what was highest in him had leapt to meet her love, and acknowledged that they belonged each to other for eternity.

John Graham awoke one morning to find himself possessed of a picture.

He had seen it between waking and sleeping, in the early hours of the night, and it had haunted his dreams till sunrise. He heard the wondrous carolling of the birds just before dawn, with a joy greater than was his wont, for it heralded the day which should bring light for his work. French John, coming in with his breakfast, for the first time in his life entered and left the tower without word or look of greeting from the artist, who, with bent brow and serious face, was sketching in the first lines of his picture with a bit of white chalk. The half-finished portrait of Mrs. Patrick Shallop looked at him with one reproachful eye from the easel; but Graham paid no heed to the neglected portrait; he was deeply engrossed in pursuing his thought and preserving it in a tangible shape. It is a rare thing, in this age of the worship of the golden calf, for the artist even to be absorbed in the love of his profession. Of old, it seems that the sages and the sculptors wrought and thought for the sake of art and learning, the spur of ambition being all that was necessary to urge them forward. To-day the goal toward which such men strive is a golden one, and the worship of money is more in vogue than the pursuit of glory.

When artists sell their souls, brains, and talents to dealers, engaging to deliver so many works of art in so many months, on such and such a cla.s.s of subjects, bargaining by the wholesale for the work which they shall produce during the coming twelve-month, what wonder that the cry of the connoisseur is, Too much technique, too little sentiment! "What is sentiment?" one would ask such a babbler; is it a thing to be measured off by the yard, or sold in canvases to suit traders, who feel the pulse of the public, and if it is feverish give more stimulant, or if it is fainting prescribe an anodyne? To such prost.i.tution do these men strive to degrade the arts, but in vain. Apollo's voice is still stronger than the c.h.i.n.k of doubloons; and there are those whose ears are ever strained to catch his mystic music. The art trade, the literary trade, may flourish luxuriantly, growing like weeds, with a rank prodigality; but the flowers of art and literature, for all that, stand serenely strong in the garden of our fair young world, growing day by day in beauty and strength. Their blossoming may be rare in this day and generation, but the plants are sound and full of a mighty sap.

Though John Graham was a man of the world, there was no taint of worldliness about him; he knew the world, because he had lived somewhat in it, but more, perhaps, because he had studied the lives of the world's people. The painting of a picture was to him of more importance than its sale; the conception of a work more than its accomplishment.

His enthusiasm was apt to wane as his picture neared completion. The great glow with which the idea came to him kept him warm and interested through all the stages of the crystallization of his thought; but when the work was finished he ceased to prize it, and either threw himself into a new composition, or patiently labored at uninteresting mechanical work until he was again inspired. It was with difficulty that he could be induced to sell his pictures; he would sometimes keep them before him for years, waiting to alter some detail or to remedy some defect. His friends, knowing his reluctance to part with them, were wont to wait till they knew the artist to be in absolute need of funds, and then quietly to walk away with the coveted picture, forcing him to accept its price. A few people only in California understood or cared for his landscapes, or the rare works of imagination which he produced; and it was through his portraits that he was chiefly known. He felt in himself an unfitness for this line of work; and had it not been for the sake of his beloved mother, partially dependent on him, it is not likely that he would ever have followed it. The reason was not far to seek why.

Graham did not succeed in that important branch of art: the individual had little interest for him; men and women absorbed him less than nature. Every tree and brooklet, dead forest leaf or purpled thunder-cloud, held for him a lesson. Men and women seen from a distance were more likely to interest him than those with whom he was thrown in close contact. When their lives and actions were viewed in an impersonal perspective, he understood them better, and often theorized about them. His thoughts were oftener occupied with people of whom he knew little than with his friends and intimates. To seek truth first and beauty second, was his creed; but his life was not always guided by that high rule; and the jack-o'-lantern beauty sometimes tempted him from the pursuit of truth, leading him on long rambles over smiling meads and into flower-hedged swamp lands. There would he lie undone, angry and smarting from the thorns through which beauty had led him; and then, turning his back upon her, would trudge earnestly along the road which leads truthward. Millicent had once whispered to him that he mistook two loving sisters for dread rivals, and that truth and beauty, when truly seen, are found together; whereat Graham had looked full into her eyes, long and steadily, and kissing her hand, with a sigh, had spoken of other things.

Lying beside him on the floor, as he worked upon his newly imagined picture, was a painting nearly finished, on which he had been working the previous day. A wooden panel, on which was represented the ever-new subject, fairest of themes to artist and poet,--two lovers, standing together in the rosy dawn of love, ere the scorching sun of pa.s.sion has deepened their cool morning into a fervid midday. The man's figure was strong and graceful, his att.i.tude one of protection; the girl's rounded and delicate body swayed toward her lover, whose arm enfolded her. His face was turned away, the eyes looking far, as if into the future; while her delicate features were turned toward him, her glance trustfully fastened on his face. The color of the warm woodland background was mellow and rich, bringing out the deeper tones of the figures. The resemblance of the girl to Millicent Almsford could hardly have been unintentional, one who knew her well would have said; and yet Graham was only half-conscious that the face and figure recalled her chief traits.

He had thought of her as he worked; and beneath his brush her bronze hair and luminous face had been shadowed out more distinctly every day.

A rare picture, full of beauty and sentiment; but thrown aside to-day for the new inspiration which had seized upon the artist. The subject to be treated was the entrance of the Poet to the abode of the Muses.

He sketched the Poet, mounted on his winged horse, just crossing the narrow, defile which led to the sacred spot. With knit brows and earnest face, Graham worked at the sketch all day; only leaving his tower when the daylight failed him. As he wandered through the dim forest aisles, he thought of Millicent for the first time, remembering that he had agreed to ride with her in the afternoon at three o'clock; it was now past six. Without the slightest feeling of remorse at his failure to keep the engagement, he determined to ride over to the house and see her. Millicent received him rather coolly, having spent the afternoon crying with worry and disappointment at his non-appearance; and he, only half noticing her mood, failed to understand it. He was dimly aware that her society was not as agreeable as usual, and consequently he devoted himself to Mrs. Deering during the evening. At first Miss Almsford kept aloof from the conversation; but later, when her lover began to talk brilliantly, she drew near to where he sat and listened to his words with downcast eyes. Graham was in wonderful vein that night; his every gesture spoke of a strong under-current of excitement. His eyes shone, and his deep voice had a thrill of enthusiasm which stirred the pulses of the calm-browed girl, sitting near by with softly folded hands and parted, breathless lips. But it was neither for Millicent, nor because of Millicent, that the young man talked so brilliantly. A more stimulating influence than hers had touched him, and he was beyond the reach of her sympathy; exalted by the wings of his genius to that clear, cool, lonely communion with the immortals which only such as he experience. Dismayed, and yet full of reverence for this new phase of his nature, Millicent was filled with a great pain. She was left behind; she could follow but not accompany the flight of his fancy; and a sense of lonely desolation chilled the hot heart-blood with a depression the like of which she had never before known. The ethereal quality of her being recognized and did honor to his bold up-winging; but the personal, selfish side rebelled at the neglect to which she was subjected. The struggle in her breast was at that time unintelligible to herself; in after days, when the baser nature had been overcome, she realized it all, and knew that the long death-struggle of self began that night when Graham's eyes looked beyond her for inspiration, up to the blue-starred empyrean over both their heads.

More from habit than because he needed her society, her lover asked her to step for a moment upon the piazza before he left. As they stood side by side, he absently took her firm, small hand in his and kissed the pink fingers one by one, as if she had been a child. All at once he perceived that she was weeping, her slender form shaken by a storm of sobs.

"Millicent, my child, what is it? Are you ill?" he asked, tenderly stroking her hair.

"No, only unhappy. Graham, why did you not come for me to-day? I waited for you all the afternoon."

"Did I not tell you, dear, that I was very busy? I have begun a new picture. I quite forgot my engagement with you,--I am very sorry," he answered, puzzled at her emotion.

"Then it is your picture that is my rival. I hate it, I hate it! I never want to see it!

"Millicent, what do you mean?"

Her only answer was to lay her aching head upon his breast, to twine her arms about him, and to sob out incoherent words of love and grief, all of which puzzled and wearied him. He soothed her tenderly; and when they parted there was a smile upon her lips, though her breast still trembled with the slow after-waves of a grief which shook her whole being.

Graham, unnerved by the tempest which he had all unwittingly aroused, reached his tower in an excited and irritable frame of mind. The first thing that met his eyes was the picture of the lovers lying at the foot of the easel. He picked it up, placed it on the table before him, and long and critically surveyed his work.

"I painted better than I knew," he sighed. "Yes, thus it is that we stand toward each other, man and woman, and ever shall stand,--the man looking out beyond, above, the woman, and she finding her utmost limit of self-projection in him. Alas and alas!" He placed the painting with its face toward the wall, and with a moody brow turned to his new sketch.