this young
man without being instantly paralyzed into non-action by the fear that he
might "suspect." Invite him to dinner to-day? It made her shiver to
think of it.

And so her afternoon was one long fret. Broken at intervals. Three
times she had to go down stairs on errands--that is, she thought she had
to go down stairs on errands. Thus, going and coming, she had six
glimpses of him, in the aggregate, without seeming to look in his
direction; and she tried to endure these electric ecstasies without
showing any sign, but they fluttered her up a good deal, and she felt
that the naturalness she was putting on was overdone and quite too
frantically sober and hysterically calm to deceive.

The painter had his share of the rapture; he had his six glimpses, and
they smote him with waves of pleasure that assaulted him, beat upon him,
washed over him deliciously, and drowned out all consciousness of what he
was doing with his brush. So there were six places in his canvas which
had to be done over again.

At last Gwendolen got some peace of mind by sending word to the
Thompsons, in the neighborhood, that she was coming there to dinner.
She wouldn't be reminded, at that table, that there was an absentee who
ought to be a presentee--a word which she meant to look out in the
dictionary at a calmer time.

About this time the old earl dropped in for a chat with the artist, and
invited him to stay to dinner. Tracy cramped down his joy and gratitude
by a sudden and powerful exercise of all his forces; and he felt that now
that he was going to be close to Gwendolen, and hear her voice and watch
her face during several precious hours, earth had nothing valuable to add
to his life for the present.

The earl said to himself, "This spectre can eat apples, apparently.
We shall find out, now, if that is a specialty. I think, myself, it's a
specialty. Apples, without doubt, constitute the spectral limit. It was
the case with our first parents. No, I am wrong--at least only partly
right. The line was drawn at apples, just as in the present case, but it
was from the other direction." The new clothes gave him a thrill of
pleasure and pride. He said to himself, "I've got part of him down to
date, anyway."

Sellers said he was pleased with Tracy's work; and he went on and engaged
him to restore his old masters, and said he should also want him to paint
his portrait and his wife's and possibly his daughter's. The tide of the