ad attempted suicide in sheer disgust with
life. I had played with the same idea for years. We had both struggled
with the world and hated it. Her imagination was more morbid than my
own, and in her quieter moments, when her affections were roused, she
was wonderfully tender and devoted. When she left the hospital she put
herself under my protection. I believe she loved me, and no one had ever
loved me before. I know she took possession of me, body and soul. I
married her. I would just as willingly have jumped into the Seine with
her if she had preferred it. For three months we lived together while I
finished the picture which I called the Priestess of Delphi, painted
from my drawings of her in her agony. The picture made a great noise in
Paris, and brought me some new friends, among the rest one who, I think,
really saved me from Charenton. Hazard called at my studio just as my
troubles were beginning to tear me to pieces. My wife had the temper of
a fury, and all the vices of Paris. Excitement was her passion; she
could not stand the quiet of an artist's life; yet her Bohemian
instincts came over her only in waves, and when they left her in peace
she still had splendid qualities that held me to her. Hazard came in
upon us one day in the middle of a terrible scene when she was
threatening again to take her own life, and trying, or pretending to try
to take mine. When he came in, she disappeared. The next I heard of her,
she was back on the stage--lost! I was worn out; my nervous system was
all gone. Then Hazard came to my help and took me off with him to the
south of Europe. Our first stage was to Avignon and Vaucluse, and there
I found how curiously my experience had affected my art. I had learned
to adore purity and repose, but I could never get hold of my ideal.
Fifty times I tried to draw Laura as I wanted to realize her and every
time I failed. I knew the secret of Petrarch and I could not tell it. My
wife came between me and my thought. All life took form in my hands as a
passion. If I could learn again to paint a child, or any thing that had
not the world in its eyes, I should be at peace at last."

As he paused here, and seemed again to be musing over St. Cecilia,
Esther's curiosity made her put in a word,

"And your wife?"--she asked.

"My wife?" he repeated in his abstracted tone, "I never saw her again
till this morning when I met her on the steps of the church."

"Then it was your wife?" cried Catherine.