an inner door.

The footman announced 'Mr. Welby.'

As soon as the door was shut, Eugenie rose.

Welby hurriedly approached her. 'You say in your note that you have
something important to tell me?'

She made a sign of assent, and as he grasped her hand, she allowed
herself a moment's pause. Her eyes rested--just perceptibly--on the
face of the man whose long devotion to her, expressed through every
phase of delicate and passionate service, had brought them both at
last to that point where feeling knows itself--where illusions die
away--and the deep foundations of our life appear.

Welby's dark face quivered. In the touch of his friend's hand, in the
look of her eyes there was that which told him that she had bidden
him to no common meeting. The air between them was in an instant alive
with memories. Days of first youth; youth's high impressions of great
and lovely things; all the innocent, stingless joys of art and travel,
of happy talk and ripening faculty, of pure ambitions, hero-worships,
compassions, shared and mutually enkindled: these were for ever
intertwined with their thoughts of each other.

But much more than these!

For him, the unspoken agony of loss suffered when she married; for
her, the memories of her marriage, of the dreary languor into which
its wreck had plunged her, and of the gradual revival in her of the
old intellectual pleasures, the old joys of the spirit, under the
influence of Arthur's life and Arthur's companionship. How simply he
had offered all that his art, his tact, his genius had to give!--and
how pitifully, how hungrily she had leaned upon it! It had seemed so
natural. Her own mind was clear, her own pulses calm; their friendship
had appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity
and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much--the hours
of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment
of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman's sweet
and agile wit can build around a man's taxed brain or ruffled nerves.
To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome,
her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he had
himself trained in her the faculty of response; to rouse in her the
gentle, diffident humour which seemed to him a much rarer and more
distinguished thing than other women's brilliance; to watch the ways
of a personality which appeared to many people a little cold, pale,
and o