with his treachery.

Of the lives of these two he knew absolutely nothing. The evident
distress which his reference to relatives and friends had occasioned Eva
during their first meeting, had caused him carefully to avoid the
subject afterward; and the other, who had never referred to her family,
he had not cared to know. He had never even considered whether she was
wife, maid or widow, until he suddenly became aware that the sentiment
he had awakened within her was not, as he had at first supposed, a
passing fancy, but a fierce passion of jealous and tyrannical love. She
no longer rallied him, and parried his compliments with her light,
pointed sarcasm, as she had done at first, but assumed an unmistakable
bearing of ownership and possession--questioning him closely regarding
other sitters and female acquaintances--while he writhed helplessly in
the exquisite misery of a spell which he felt himself powerless to
break.

Thus far he had never surrendered himself entirely to this passion. More
than once he had hesitated on the very brink of the precipice. Whether
it was the haunting face of Eva Delorme that stayed him, or something in
the manner of the other, he could not tell.

One day he suddenly caught her in his arms. She suffered his embrace
for a moment, then drew away from him.

"When we are married, Paul," she said, tenderly, "I will take you to
Italy, where in some beautiful villa we will give ourselves up wholly to
our love. I am rich, Paul, rich; and it is all yours, but we must wait."

He turned white and was silent. The thought of marriage with this woman
had never entered his head. He had already asked Eva Delorme to be his
wife. She had long since confessed her love for him, but had deferred
her answer from week to week, and with such evident distress of mind
that the young artist felt that a secret sorrow lay heavily upon her
life. He longed to fly with her to some far country, away from it all,
and from the dark shadows that encompassed his own.

The similarity of features which he had at first noticed in his two
sitters was at times almost forgotten; at others it had recurred to him
and haunted him like a nightmare. More than once he had imagined he saw
the fleeting something in one woman that reminded him of the other. He
had dallied over the portraits, making them photographically minute for
comparison. He had hesitated guiltily about showing either of these to
the other woman. He had sometimes