te died out
of her heart. After all, Audrey was so perfect from an artistic point of
view that moral disapproval seemed somehow beside the point.'

"May I come in?" asked Audrey, tapping at the open door of the studio.
Ted rose with a reverent alacrity, very much as you rise to the musical
parts of a solemn service in church. He arranged her chair carefully,
with soft cushions for her back and feet. "If you don't mind," said he,
"we must work hard, for I want to finish you this morning, or perhaps
to-morrow, if you can give me another sitting," and he patted a cushion
and held it up for her head.

"You can have any number of sittings," said Audrey, ignoring these
preparations for her comfort; "but first of all, I'm going to make your
room pretty."

Ted dropped his cushion helplessly and followed her as she moved about
the room. First she took off her gloves in a leisurely manner and laid
them down among Ted's wet brushes. Then she began to arrange the lilies
of the valley in a little copper bowl she found on the chimneypiece.
Then she caught sight of her gloves and exclaimed, "Oh, look at my
beautiful new gloves, lying among your nasty paints! Why didn't you tell
me, you horrid boy?" Then Ted and she tried to clean them with
turpentine, and made them worse than ever, and between them they wasted
half an hour of the precious morning. After that, Audrey took off her
hat and settled herself comfortably among the cushions; she drew her
white fingers through her hair till it stood up in a great red aureole
round her head, and the sitting began.

Ted's heart gave a bound as he set to work. He had learnt by this time
to control the trembling of his hands, otherwise the portrait would
never have reached its present perfection. He had painted from many
women in the life school, and always with the same emotions, the same
reverence for womanhood, and the same delight in his own power, tempered
by compassion for the model. But these were so many studies in still
life compared with the incarnate loveliness before him--Audrey: it made
him feel giddy to paint the edge of the ruffles about her throat, or the
tip of her shoe. Her beauty throbbed like pulses of light, it floated in
air and went to his head like the scent of her lilies. He had reproduced
this radiant, throbbing effect in his picture. It was a head, the
delicate oval of the full face relieved against a background of
atmospheric gold into which the golden surface tints