t they're so sad! So sad it's cruel!" she objected.

"Oh, no," he objected to her objection; "it's not quite as bad as that."

"They make me perfectly miserable."

He whipped the canvas off the easel, saying dryly:

"Don't think of them again!"

It looked like impatience. With hands thrust in his pockets he took a
purposeless half-turn in the room, then came back to her side.

"If you totally detest them, I am sorry," he said mildly. "I had wanted
to offer you one, a little, unobtrusive one to stick in some corner, a
token of the artist's regard."

"Oh, do! do!" she grasped at his friendly tender. "Find a little
cheerful one, if you can. I shall love to have it."

He selected a small panel of a single tall, palely expanding garden
poppy, more gray than violet, against a background of shade. Flower
though it was, it still affected one like the portrait of a lady wronged
and suffering.

In the drawing-room to which they returned Giovanna had lighted a lamp.
The fire had properly caught and was burning more brightly; the place
looked rosy and warm, after the winter twilight filling the other room
and the chill that reigned there.

Aurora returned to the tea-table; with a disengaged air she reached for
plum-cake. She ascertained with comfort that Mrs. Foss did not look sad
or Estelle ill used; that the abbe was as serene as ever and Miss
Seymour, after her talk with Mrs. Foss, rather serener than usual.
Gerald was far jollier than any of his portraits. To make sure that she
was no depressing object herself, she smiled the warmest, sunniest smile
she was capable of.

"Do come and talk a little bit with me, before I have to go home!" she
unexpectedly called out to the abbe.

When at the end of the long evening spent together smoking and talking
the two friends separated for the night, Gerald went to his room as did
Vincent to his. But Gerald had no more than pulled off his necktie when
he changed his mind, went back to the drawing-room, crossed the
tobacco-scented space where something seemed to linger of the warmth of
goodfellowship, and entered the farther room.

A doubt had risen in his mind. He could not wait till morning to see his
work with a fresh eye, an eye as fresh as Mrs. Hawthorne's, and satisfy
himself as to whether he, so careful of truth, had unconsciously come to
exaggerating, falsifying his impressions, grown guilty of hollow
mannerisms.

Whatever he had said, he had been stung by Mrs. Hawtho