re showed a pale gleam from the Thames between the house-backs of
brownish-grey brick; to her right roof-tops and fantastic cowls were
patterned in a flat purple tone against the luminous sky. In the eaves
the sparrows were chirping shrilly; one flew downwards so swiftly
between Blanche's eyes and the sky that his little body seemed nothing
but a dark blot with a flickering upon either side of it. The sight
caught at her memory, and she had a quick vision of a day when she had
lain upon a sloping cliff and watched the gulls wheel far above her, the
light of the setting sun making their breasts and the underneath of
their wings flash like silver. A smaller bird had darted past, and then,
as now, she had noted the curious effect of the solid little body
flanked by that flickering which meant wings invisible through their own
speed. The surface of her mind was quick to respond to suggestion, and
the thought of the country struck her as being an answer to the unspoken
questionings that were pricking at her. The West--the land of ready
sleep and sweet dreams. So Ishmael had told her, and the way lay open if
she chose to take it, a way that would not necessarily commit her to
anything. When she saw Ishmael in his own environment, then she would
know whether it were worth it or not....

To blot herself out of existence for a few weeks, that was what it
amounted to; there should be no such person as the town-ridden Blanche
Nevill on the face of the earth. She felt a delightful stirring of
anticipation, and nothing had had power to awaken that emotion in her
for several years. Her own surroundings once shed, she would, she felt,
meet a new world with all the hopes and dreams that had once been hers.
She was twenty-six years of age, though with her bland face she looked
much younger; and the truth was she had no love for any work in itself,
but only for the praise it brought her--a temperament which can never
make the artist, but results in the brilliant amateur.

She was sick of the stage, for no worthy captive of her bow and spear
had presented himself, and she detected the dawning of criticism in the
friends that had been so warm when she first met them in town. Blanche
was always posing, and people had found it out. As a child she had
played the misunderstood genius or shy mother's darling as occasion
demanded; she had posed with others till she was unable to do anything
but pose with herself. A few years, a very few years, a