The next day, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, Hudson called.  He came with stiff, angular motions of his long, thin legs, up the four steep, shabby flights and stopped at the top to get his breath.

“The picture ain’t worth the climb,” he thought; and then, struck by the peculiar stillness of the garret floor, he frowned.  “Damned if the feller ain’t out!” He took a stride forward and knocked at Arundel’s door.  There was no answer.  He turned the knob and stepped into the studio.

A screen stood between him and one half of the room.  The other half was empty.  The place was very cold and still.  It was deplorably bare and shabby in the wintry morning light.  Some one had eaten a meager breakfast from a tray on the little table near the stove.  Hudson’s canvas stood against the wall facing him, and its presence gave him a feeling of ownership, of a right to be there.  He put his long, stiff hands into his pockets and strolled forward.  He came round the corner of the screen and found himself looking at the dead body of his host.

The nurse, that morning, had come and gone.  With Sheila’s help she had prepared Arundel for his burial.  He lay in all the formal detachment of death, his eyelids drawn decently down over his eyes, his lips put carefully together, his hands, below their white cuffs and black sleeves, laid carefully upon the clean smooth sheet.

Hudson drew in a hissing breath, and at the sound Sheila, crumpled up in exhausted slumber on the floor beside the bed, awoke and lifted her face.

It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair cutting into the center of her forehead.  The mouth struck a note of life with its dull, soft red.  There was not lacking in this young face the slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty.  Sheila had a strange, arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing.  Her eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness—­indescribable eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and slender, arched black brows.

Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat and looked at Hudson.  Then she got to her feet.  She was soft and silken, smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin.  She had put on an old black dress, just a scrap of a flimsy, little worn-out gown.  A certain slim, crushable quality of her body was accentuated by this flimsiness of covering.  She looked as though she could be drawn through a ring—­as though, between your hands, you could fold her to nothing.  A thin little kitten of silky fur and small bones might have the same feel as Sheila.

She stood up now and looked tragically and helplessly at Hudson and tried to speak.

He backed away from the bed, beckoned to her, and met her in the other half of the room so that the leather screen stood between them and the dead man.  They spoke in hushed voices.