.'

She turned her chair a little and looked at him. She was astonished at
the change in his appearance. His hideous obesity seemed no longer
repellent, for his eyes wore a new expression; they were incredibly
tender now, and they were moist with tears. His mouth was tortured by a
passionate distress. Margaret had never seen so much unhappiness on a
man's face, and an overwhelming remorse seized her.

'I don't want to be unkind to you,' she said.

'I will go. That is how I can best repay you for what you have done.'

The words were so bitter, so humiliated, that the colour rose to her
cheeks.

'I ask you to stay. But let us talk of other things.'

For a moment he kept silence. He seemed no longer to see Margaret, and
she watched him thoughtfully. His eyes rested on a print of _La Gioconda_
which hung on the wall. Suddenly he began to speak. He recited the
honeyed words with which Walter Pater expressed his admiration for that
consummate picture.

'Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one
of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how
would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its
maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have
etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and
make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of
Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias.'

His voice, poignant and musical, blended with the suave music of the
words so that Margaret felt she had never before known their divine
significance. She was intoxicated with their beauty. She wished him to
continue, but had not the strength to speak. As if he guessed her
thought, he went on, and now his voice had a richness in it as of an
organ heard afar off. It was like an overwhelming fragrance and she could
hardly bear it.

'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she
has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has
been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and
trafficked for strange evils with Eastern merch