oman, the stalk of
asphodel, who had unhinged it. The great painter, sensitive ever to
colour and beauty and flattery and happiness, to pin-pricks and to
sneers, had dropped in pieces before a real strain--sin for which he
held himself responsible, remorse that found no outlet wide enough for
his great transcendent heart.

Presently he stood still before his picture, threw back the curtain, and
surveyed it with folded arms.

"She was pure," he muttered, half to himself; "sweet, sweet as new milk
from warm udders in cowslip time, and I--I brought her to my cobwebbed
life without so much as a preliminary sweep of the broom. She thought me
like herself, and I dared not undeceive her; but others--curse
them!--they taught her. She was pure as milk, I said--ay, for milk
absorbs poison quicker than things less pure. She breathed the taint
from the loathly atmosphere of my world--of the world that had been
mine.... But I loved her ... would have won her back--cringed to her.
She spurned me, spited me through herself, evaded me, till"--a
shuddering horror stifled his voice--"till, by chance, I came on
_that_."

I followed him to the easel, and placed an affectionate arm on his
shoulder.

"Well, old man, you must clear out of this. Come along with me back to
the Bush, and drop this nightmare."

"Drop it?" he flouted; "why, the world reeks of it!"

"Not now. You say that even the priests absolve you."

"Cheap contrition! cheap absolution! how one cuddles them at first--at
first! But in time we feel our canker--it grows under the clean Church
wrappings--in time we learn that where our sanctuary is, there, alone,
can our penance be. Hence this picture. It accompanies the portrait, a
gift to the nation. You can't think what a going down on the marrow
bones it was--down on the stones for every rascal to gaze and prod at,
an attitude for eternity."

"You'll come to Australia?" I repeated, adhering obstinately to my
matter-of-fact bent.

"As you please. I feel clean enough for your company now, for I have
committed suicide--not vulgarly, by murdering myself, but suicide
spiritually. I have given up the ghost by working out the pitch through
the point of my brush, and the carcass is yours to bury where or how you
will."

In a Cornfield (Dialogue).

(_The field is divided by a stile and a hedge from some
pastures._)

HE (_bent double in the act of gathering poppies_). And what would you
vote about?

SHE