h the experience. She displayed a degree of
trained taste and a certain individual choice, favouring the tenderer
and gentler works of Mendelssohn and Mozart. She sang also one or two of
Heine's love songs in the German with a touch of passion and regret,
whilst Wyndham accompanied her; and he himself wound up the evening in
more jovial mood with a rousing student's song from his old Munich days.

Their parting with him had almost a touch of affection; and the final
understanding was that he was to plan out the arrangements for the
sittings, and to communicate with them in the morning.

He was forgetting his box of cigars at the end, but Mr. Robinson
carefully caught it up from the hall table, and brought it after him
just as the servant was opening the door.

VII

The next morning early Wyndham jumped out of bed with a bewildered sense
of some change in his life, and it was an instant or two before his
faculties cleared and he remembered his adventure of the previous
evening. His next thought was one of pleasure that he had at last
carried out his resolution of rising early. The autumn had developed
with unusual severity, but the morning was intensely clear, and the
studio full of a strong light. He pushed aside the hanging, and looked
down from the gallery on the familiar scene below. Ordinarily, on
rising, the sight had filled him with disgust and apathy, but now a
freshness and vigour pervaded him, a new imperious desire, not merely in
his mind but in all his limbs and muscles, to enter again on the contest
with men. As his thought ran back through the past intolerable year or
two, his inaction and sloth seemed almost incredible. He saw himself
rising at midday, suffering moral tortures before the work he was
powerless to begin, letting the barren hours drift away into the deep,
then regretting them passionately. Was it not all a nightmare from which
he had been curiously released?

He dressed, and, whilst his little kettle was boiling, took careful
stock of his professional materials. Colours, brushes, varnishes--all
needed renewing; there seemed nothing but impracticable odds and ends,
mere bits of wreckage from his disastrous life's venture. Then, too, the
filth and disorder all around him struck him brusquely, stung him to
annoyance. On every surface where dust might accumulate it lay in serene
possession. Wherever spiders could spin, there the webs hung thick,
amazing and complicated citadels, prod