ow while he took a cigar and cut off the end, with
unusual deliberation.

"Hang it all!" he finally grumbled, "why don't you speak? Have you
seen--Mrs. Dupont?"

"Yes, I have," I answered, rather surprised, because to me he generally
called her Frances now, as we all did.

"And she has told you all about it, of course!"

"She only told me that she had a severe headache, and would see no one,
not even Frieda."

He looked at me, sharply, after which he lit a match for his cigar, with
a hand that was decidedly shaky. Then he paced up and down the big room,
nervously, while I stared at him in anxious surprise.

"Oh! You can look at me!" he exclaimed, after a moment. "I'm the clever
chap who warned you against that woman, am I not? Marked _explosive_, I
told you she ought to be. And now you can have your laugh, if you want
to. Go ahead and don't mind me!"

For a moment I felt my chest constricted as with a band of iron. I felt
that I could hardly breathe, and the hand I put up to my forehead met a
cold and clammy surface.

"For God's sake, Gordon!" I cried, "what--what have you----?"

He pitched the cigar in the fireplace and stood before me, his hands
deep in his trousers pockets, his voice coming cold and hard, the words
forced and sounding artificial and metallic.

"What have I done? You want to know, eh? Oh! It's soon enough told.
First I did a 'Mother and Child,' a devil of a good piece of work, too.
And, while I was painting it, I saturated every fiber of me with the
essence of that wonderful face. Man alive! Her husky little voice, when
I permitted her to speak, held an appeal that slowly began to madden me.
Oh! It didn't come on the first day, or the first week, but, by the time
I was putting on the last few strokes of the brush, I realized that I
was making an arrant fool of myself, caught by the mystery of those
great dark eyes, bound hand and foot by the glorious tresses of her
hair, trapped by that amazing smile upon her face. Then, I
worked--worked as I never did before, fevered by the eagerness to finish
that picture and send her away, out of my sight. I was tempted to leave
the thing unfinished, but I couldn't! I wanted to run away and called
myself every name under the sun, and gritted my teeth. Up and down this
floor I walked till all hours. I decided that it was but a sudden fever,
a distemper that would pass off when she was no longer near me. Every
day I swore I would react against it. What