monds, who was visible to him on his host's right
hand opposite, became one of the glowing vermilion sunsets that he had
watched so many times over Deadman's Bay, with the form of Avice in the
foreground. Between his eyes and the judge who sat next to Nichola, with
a chin so raw that he must have shaved every quarter of an hour during
the day, intruded the face of Avice, as she had glanced at him in their
last parting. The crannied features of the evergreen society lady, who,
if she had been a few years older, would have been as old-fashioned as
her daughter, shaped themselves to the dusty quarries of his and Avice's
parents, down which he had clambered with Avice hundreds of times. The
ivy trailing about the table-cloth, the lights in the tall candlesticks,
and the bunches of flowers, were transmuted into the ivies of the
cliff-built Castle, the tufts of seaweed, and the lighthouses on the
isle. The salt airs of the ocean killed the smell of the viands, and
instead of the clatter of voices came the monologue of the tide off the
Beal.

More than all, Nichola Pine-Avon lost the blooming radiance which she
had latterly acquired; she became a woman of his acquaintance with no
distinctive traits; she seemed to grow material, a superficies of flesh
and bone merely, a person of lines and surfaces; she was a language in
living cipher no more.

When the ladies had withdrawn it was just the same. The soul of
Avice--the only woman he had NEVER loved of those who had loved
him--surrounded him like a firmament. Art drew near to him in the person
of one of the most distinguished of portrait painters; but there was
only one painter for Jocelyn--his own memory. All that was eminent
in European surgery addressed him in the person of that harmless and
unassuming fogey whose hands had been inside the bodies of hundreds of
living men; but the lily-white corpse of an obscure country-girl chilled
the interest of discourse with such a king of operators.

Reaching the drawing-room he talked to his hostess. Though she had
entertained three-and-twenty guests at her table that night she had
known not only what every one of them was saying and doing throughout
the repast, but what every one was thinking. So, being an old friend,
she said quietly, 'What has been troubling you? Something has, I know. I
have been travelling over your face and have seen it there.'

Nothing could less express the meaning his recent news had for him than
a statemen