the woods, because Louis, after adding the flames to Bernini's
composition, finally pronounced the statue unworthy of himself and
of the sacred enclosure of the Park. So here, on the outer edge of
Versailles, the crumbling failure rises, in exile to this day, without
so much as a railing to protect it from the scribbling tourist who
writes his name all over it. In the realm of Art, it seemed, the
King's writ still ran, and the King's doom stood.

Fenwick's rhetorical sense was touched by the statue and its history.
He examined it, talking fast and well, Eugenie meanwhile winning from
him all he had to give, by the simplest words and looks--he the reed,
and she the player. His mind, his fancy, worked easily once more,
under the stimulus of her presence. His despondency began to give way.
He believed in himself--felt himself an artist--again. The relief,
physical and mental, was too tempting. He flung himself upon it with
reckless desire, incapable of denying himself, or of counting the
cost. And meanwhile, the effect of her black scarf, loosened, and
eddying round her head and face in the soft night wind, defining their
small oval, and the beauty of the brow, enchanted his painter's eye.
There was a moment, just as they reentered the Park, when, as she
stood looking at a moon-touched vista before them, the floating scarf
suddenly recalled to him the outline of that lovely hood in which
Romney framed the radiant head of Lady Hamilton as 'The Sempstress.'

The recollection startled him. Romney! Involuntarily there flashed
across him Phoebe's use of the Romney story--her fierce comments
on the deserted wife--the lovely mistress. Perhaps, while she stood
looking at the portrait in his studio, she was thinking of Lady
Hamilton, and all sorts of other ludicrous and shameful things!

And _this_, all the while, was the reality--this pure, ethereal being,
in whose presence he was already a better and a more hopeful man!--who
seemed to bring a fellow comfort, and moral renewal, in the mere touch
of her kind hand.

The shock of inner debate still further weakened his self-control.
He slipped, hardly knowing how or why, into a far more intimate
confession of himself than he had yet made to her. In the morning he
had given her the _outer_ history of his life, during the year of
her absence. But this was the inner history of a man's weakness
and failure--of his quarrels and hatreds, his baffled ambitions
and ideals. She put it to