And he—­miserable fellow!—­to him it was peace after struggle, balm after torment.  For his thoughts, as he wandered through the Satory woods alone, had been the thoughts of a hypochondriac.  He hastened to leave them, now that she was near.

They wandered along the eastern edge of the ‘Swiss Water,’ towards the woods amid which the railway runs.  Through the gold-and-purple air the thin autumn trees rose lightly into the evening sky, marching in ordered ranks beside the water.  Young men were fishing in the lake; boys and children were playing near it, and sweethearts walking in the dank grass.  The evening peace, with its note of decay and death, seemed to stir feeling rather than soothe it.  It set the nerves trembling.

He began to talk of some pictures he had been studying in the Palace that day—­Nattiers, Rigauds, Drouais—­examples of that happy, sensuous, confident art, produced by a society that knew no doubts of itself, which not to have enjoyed—­so the survivors of it thought—­was to be for ever ignorant of what the charm of life might be.

Fenwick spoke of it with envy and astonishment.  The pleasure of it had penetrated him, its gay, perpetual festa—­as compared with the strain of thought and conscience under which the modern lives.

’It gives me a perfect hunger for fine clothes, and jewels, and masquerades—­and “fetes de nuit”—­and every sort of theatricality and expense!  Nature has sent us starvelings on the scene a hundred years late.  We are like children in the rain, flattening our noses against a ballroom window.’

‘There were plenty of them then,’ said Eugenie.  ’But they broke in and sacked the ballroom.’

‘Yes.  What folly!’ he said, bitterly.  ’We are all still groping among the ruins.’

’No, no!  Build a new Palace of Beauty—­and bring everybody in—­out of the rain.’

‘Ridiculous!’ he declared, with sparkling eyes.  Art and pleasure were only for the few.  Try and spread them, make current coin of them, and they vanished like fairy gold.

‘So only the artist may be happy?’

‘The artist is never happy!’ he said, roughly.  ’But the few people who appreciate him and rob him, enjoy themselves.  By the way, I took one of your ideas this morning, and made a sketch of it.  I haven’t noted a composition of any sort for weeks—­except for this beastly play.  It came to me while we talked.’

‘Ah!’ Her face, turned to him, received the news with a shrinking pleasure.

He developed his idea before her, drawing it on the air with his stick, or on the sand of the alleys where the arching trees overhead seemed still to hold a golden twilight captive.  The picture was to represent that fine metal-worker of the ancien regime who, when the Revolution came, took his ragged children with him and went to the palace which contained his work—­work for which he had never been paid—­and hammered it to pieces.