“And perhaps it is my fault,” she whispered desperately.  “Perhaps I have asked too much, and waited too long.  Perhaps they see—­what I do not—­and women lie—­and I only think I feel!  Perhaps I am weathered and inflexible, and hard and old and cold, and they know, and become afraid!”

But there was stern denial in the face before her—­reproach in the eyes she had made of paint....  In her terror before these thoughts, which struck home in the hour of her weakness, the art of the thing suddenly prevailed—­good work, the valiant rescuer....  She remembered how her presence had aroused the giant in the Other.  Her spell had done that.  She had felt the crush of his arms, and queer fires had laughed across her brain.  Then she fell again with the thought, that even that had not sufficed.  Her pride had sent him away even after that—­his laugh, his Greek beauty, his passion and all....  And now it came to her with fierce reality, that should the Other ever return, it would only make these later hours and later memories burn the deeper....  A temptation came to hold Bedient—­as a woman could—­to keep him from going to another woman, but her eyes fell with swift shame from the picture.

“I have not made you common—­how can I be common with you?” she cried.  “Oh, why could you not always remember your best, you, who have helped others so?”

The light, though gray, was still strong.  Fixed upon the canvas, as she had never seen it before, was a revelation of one of those high moments which had exalted Vina Nettleton, and changed David Cairns in the whole order of his being.  She almost listened for him to speak of the natural greatness of women.

“But you are forgetting those higher moments,” she whispered.  “That’s the way with men and boys—­to forget—­to run away for the little things beside the ocean——­”

But the face denied; the face was of purity.  It regarded her steadily in her long watching—­a fixture of poise, happiness assured....  Then the need of haste and work, left deep in her mind, arose to the surface with a strong and sudden urging—­the delivery to-morrow.  Her heart, her flesh, her soul, all were at war and weary unto death.  It was hideous to attempt to touch it again that day; yet to-morrow an evil light ... and now came the full realization of a remarkable fact.

The final inner lustre was there.  The thing she had long been afraid to do, save in the exact perfect moment, was done.  That Something of his was before her, its lifting valor not to be denied....

It was just before he had asked her to ride, she recalled now.  An elate concentration had held her while she painted.  She had not spoken; she had hardly known the world about her.  It had been too big to leave a memory....  It was done.  It pleaded for him.  It was like the Shadowy Sister pleading for him.  Swiftly, she signed the work.  It was his.  That was hard.

...In the veil of dusk she was still kneeling, her face ghastly with waiting....  And not until pride intervened again, and prevailed upon her to see him no more, after the last ride together, did she find some old friendly tears, almost as remote from the days she now lived, as Florentine springtimes of student memory.