upon her eyes, however, that Winifred's were fixed: it was upon the
lady's bosom, for out from beneath the partially-loosened robes that
covered that bosom a tiny fork of flame was flickering like a
serpent's tongue ruddy from the fires of a cruel and monstrous hate
within.

This sight was dreadful enough; but it was not the terror on
Winifred's face that now sent me reeling against Sleaford, who with
my mother had followed me into the smaller room. Whose figure was
that, and whose was the face which at first I had half-recognised in
the Lady Geraldine? My mother's!

In painting this subject Wilderspin had, without knowing it, worked
with too strong a reminiscence of my mother's portrait, unconscious
that he was but giving expression to the awful irony of Heaven.

I turned round. Wilderspin was supporting with difficulty my mother's
dead weight. For the first time (as I think) in her life, she whom,
until I came to know Sinfi Lovell, I had believed to be the
strongest, proudest, bravest woman living, had fainted.

'Dear me!' said Wilderspin, 'I had no idea that Christabel's terror
was so strongly rendered,--no idea! Art should never produce an
effect like this. Romantic art knows nothing of a mere sensational
illusion. Dear me!--I must soften it at once.'

He was evidently quite unconscious that he had given my mother's
features to Geraldine, and attributed the effect to his own
superlative strength as a dramatic artist.

I ran to her: she soon recovered, but asked to be taken to Belgrave
Square at once. Wild as I was with the desire to go in quest of
Winifred; goaded as I was by a new, nameless, shapeless dread which
certain words of Wilderspin's had aroused, but which (like the dread
that had come to me on the night of my father's funeral) was too
appalling to confront, I was obliged to leave the studio and take my
mother to the house of my aunt, who was, I knew, waiting to start for
the yacht.

XI

THE IRONY OF HEAVEN

I

As we stepped into the carriage, Sleaford, full of sympathy, jumped
in. This fortunately prevented a conversation that would have been
intolerable both to my mother and to me.

'Studio oppressively close,' said Sleaford; 'usual beastly smell of
turpentine and pigments and things. Why the dooce don't these fellows
ventilate their studios before they get ladies to go to see their
paintin's!' This he kept repeating, but got no response from either
of us.

As to me, let me hone