the position.  The young woman isolated and childless, so charming, so nobly sincere, so full of heart—­was she to be always Ariadne, and forsaken?  The man—­excitable, nervous, selfish, yet, in truth, affectionate and dependent—­what folly, or what chivalry kept him unmarried?  Ever since the death of M. le Comte de Pastourelles, dreams concerning these two people had been stirring in the brain of Watson, and these dreams spoke now in the dark eyes he bent on Fenwick.

Presently, Fenwick began to talk gloomily of the death of his old Bernard Street landlady, who had become his housekeeper and factotum in the new Chelsea house and studio, which he had built for himself.

’I don’t know what I shall do without her.  For eleven years I’ve never paid a bill or engaged a servant for myself.  She’s done everything.  Every morning she used to give me my pocket-money for the day.’

‘The remedy, after all, is simple,’ said Watson, with a sudden turn of the head.

Fenwick raised his eyebrows interrogatively.

’I imagine that what Mrs. Gibbs did well, “Mrs. Fenwick” might do even better—­n’est-ce pas?’

Fenwick sprang up.

‘Mrs.—?’ he repeated, vaguely.

He stood a moment bending over Watson—­his eyes staring, his mouth open.  Then he controlled himself.

‘You talk as though she were round the corner,’ he said, turning away and buttoning his coat afresh.  ’But please understand, my dear fellow, that she is not round the corner, nor likely to be.’

He spoke with a hard emphasis, smiling, and slapping the breast of his coat.

Watson looked at him and said no more.

Fenwick walked rapidly along the Quai Voltaire, crossed the Pont Neuf, and found himself inside the enclosure of the Louvre.  Twenty minutes to four.  Some impulse, born of the seething thoughts within, took him to the door of the Musee.  He mounted rapidly, and found himself in the large room devoted to the modern French school.

He went straight to two pictures by Hippolyte Flandrin—­’Madame Vinet’ and ‘Portrait de Jeune Fille.’  When, in the first year of his London life, he had made his hurried visits to Paris, these pictures, then in the Luxembourg, had been among those which had most vitally affected him.  The beautiful surface and keeping which connected them with the old tradition, together with the modern spirit, the trenchant simplicity of their portraiture, had sent him back—­eager and palpitating—­to his own work on the picture of Madame de Pastourelles, or on the last stages of the ‘Genius Loci.’

He looked into them now, sharply, intently, his heart beating to suffocation under the stress of that startling phrase of Watson’s.  Still tremulous—­as one in flight—­he made himself recognise certain details of drawing and modelling in ‘Madame Vinet’ which had given him hints for the improvement of the portrait of Phoebe; and, again, the ease with which the head moves on its shoulders, its relief, its refinement—­how he had toiled to rival them in his picture of Madame Eugenie!—­translating as he best could the cold and disagreeable colour of the Ingres school into the richer and more romantic handling of an art influenced by Watts and Burne-Jones!