re I realized what was
taking place, you threw off your wraps and were in the water."

"Oh!" gasped Sylvia.

"Now, I ask you to regard the situation impersonally," said Trenholme,
sinking his eyes humbly to the ground and keeping them there. "I had
either to reveal my presence and startle you greatly, or remain where
I was and wait until you went off again.

"Whether it was wise or not, I elected for the easier course. I think
I would act similarly if placed in the like predicament tomorrow or
next day. After all, there is nothing so very remarkable in a lady
taking a morning swim that an involuntary onlooker should be shocked
or scandalized by it. You and I were strangers to each other. Were we
friends, we might have been swimming in company."

Sylvia uttered some incoherent sound, but Trenholme, once launched in
his recital, meant to persevere with it to the bitter end.

"I still hold that I chose the more judicious way out of a difficult
situation," he said. "Had I left it at that, all would have been well.
But the woman tempted me, and I did eat."

"Indeed, the woman did nothing of the sort," came the vehement
protest.

"I speak in the artistic sense. You can not imagine, you will never
know, what an exquisite picture you and the statue of Aphrodite made
when mirrored in that shining water. I forgot every consideration but
the call of art, which, when it is genuine, is irresistible,
overwhelming. Fearing only that you might take one plunge and go, I
grabbed my palette and a canvas and began to work.

"I used pure color, and painted as one reads of the fierce labor of
genius. For once in my life I was inspired. I had caught an effect
which I might have sought in vain during the remainder of my life. I
painted real flesh, real water. Even the reeds and shrubs by the side
of the lake were veritable glimpses of actuality. Then, when I had
given some species of immortality to a fleeting moment, you returned
to the house, and I was left alone with a dream made permanent, a
memory transfixed on canvas, a picture which would have created a
sensation in the Salon----"

"Oh, surely, you would not exhibit me--it----" breathed the girl.

"No," he said grimly. "That conceit is dead and buried. But I want you
to realize that during those few minutes I was not John Trenholme, an
artist struggling for foothold on the steep crags of the painter's
rock of endeavor, but a master of the craft gazing from some high
pinnacle