. Try and spread them, make current coin of them, and
they vanished like fairy gold.

'So only the artist may be happy?'

'The artist is never happy!' he said, roughly. 'But the few people who
appreciate him and rob him, enjoy themselves. By the way, I took one
of your ideas this morning, and made a sketch of it. I haven't noted
a composition of any sort for weeks--except for this beastly play. It
came to me while we talked.'

'Ah!' Her face, turned to him, received the news with a shrinking
pleasure.

He developed his idea before her, drawing it on the air with his
stick, or on the sand of the alleys where the arching trees overhead
seemed still to hold a golden twilight captive. The picture was to
represent that fine metal-worker of the _ancien regime_ who, when the
Revolution came, took his ragged children with him and went to the
palace which contained his work--work for which he had never been
paid--and hammered it to pieces.

Fenwick talked himself at last into something like enthusiasm; and
Eugenie listened to him with a pitiful eagerness, only anxious to lead
him on, to put this friendship, and the pure sympathy and compassion
of her feeling for him, between her and the ugly memory which hovered
round her like a demon thing. These dreams of the intellect and of
art, as they gradually rose and took shape between them, were so
infinitely welcome! Clean, blameless, strengthening--they put the
ghosts to flight, they gave her back herself.

'Oh, you must paint it!' she said--'you must.'

He stopped, and walked on abruptly. Then she pressed him to promise
her a time and date. It must be ready for a new gallery, and a
distinguished exhibition, just about to open.

He shook his head.

'I probably shan't care about it to-morrow.'

She protested.

'Just now you were so keen!'

He hesitated--then blurted out--'Because I was talking to you! When
you're not there--I know very well--I shall fall back to where I was
before.'

She tried to laugh at him for a too dependent friend, who must always
be fed on sugar-plums of praise; but the silence with which he met
her, checked her. It was too full of emotion; and she ran away from
it.

She ran, however, in vain. They reached the end of the lake, and went
to look at the mouldering statue of Louis Quatorze at its further
end--fantastic work of the great Bernini--Louis on a vast, curly-maned
beast, with flames bursting round him--flung out into the wilderness
and