tant for a man who felt that he
had the command of all time. Nevertheless his disappearance "without a
trace," that of a personage in a fairy-tale or a melodrama, made a
considerable impression on his friend as the months went on; so that,
though he had never before had the least difficulty about entering into
the play of Gabriel's humour, Nick now recalled with a certain fanciful
awe the special accent with which he had ranked himself among
imperishable things. He wondered a little if he hadn't at last,
balancing always on the stretched tight-rope of his wit, fallen over on
the wrong side. He had never before, of a truth, been so nearly witless,
and would have to have gone mad in short to become so singularly simple.
Perhaps indeed he was acting only more than usual in his customary
spirit--thoughtfully contributing, for Nick's enlivenment, a purple rim
of mystery to an horizon now so dreadfully let down. The mystery at any
rate remained; another shade of purple in fact was virtually added to
it. Nick had the prospect, for the future, of waiting to see, all
curiously, when Nash would turn up, if ever, and the further
diversion--it almost consoled him for the annoyance of being left with a
second unfinished thing on his hands--of imagining in the portrait he
had begun an odd tendency to fade gradually from the canvas. He couldn't
catch it in the act, but he could have ever a suspicion on glancing at
it that the hand of time was rubbing it away little by little--for all
the world as in some delicate Hawthorne tale--and making the surface
indistinct and bare of all resemblance to the model. Of course the moral
of the Hawthorne tale would be that his personage would come back in
quaint confidence on the day his last projected shadow should have
vanished.

L

One day toward the end of March of the following year, in other words
more than six months after Mr. Nash's disappearance, Bridget Dormer came
into her brother's studio and greeted him with the effusion that
accompanies a return from an absence. She had been staying at
Broadwood--she had been staying at Harsh. She had various things to tell
him about these episodes, about his mother, about Grace, about her small
subterraneous self, and about Percy's having come, just before, over to
Broadwood for two days; the longest visit with which, almost since they
could remember, the head of the family had honoured their common parent.
Nick noted indeed that this demons