Fenwick talked himself at last into something like enthusiasm; and Eugenie listened to him with a pitiful eagerness, only anxious to lead him on, to put this friendship, and the pure sympathy and compassion of her feeling for him, between her and the ugly memory which hovered round her like a demon thing.  These dreams of the intellect and of art, as they gradually rose and took shape between them, were so infinitely welcome!  Clean, blameless, strengthening—­they put the ghosts to flight, they gave her back herself.

‘Oh, you must paint it!’ she said—­’you must.’

He stopped, and walked on abruptly.  Then she pressed him to promise her a time and date.  It must be ready for a new gallery, and a distinguished exhibition, just about to open.

He shook his head.

‘I probably shan’t care about it to-morrow.’

She protested.

‘Just now you were so keen!’

He hesitated—­then blurted out—­’Because I was talking to you!  When you’re not there—­I know very well—­I shall fall back to where I was before.’

She tried to laugh at him for a too dependent friend, who must always be fed on sugar-plums of praise; but the silence with which he met her, checked her.  It was too full of emotion; and she ran away from it.

She ran, however, in vain.  They reached the end of the lake, and went to look at the mouldering statue of Louis Quatorze at its further end—­fantastic work of the great Bernini—­Louis on a vast, curly-maned beast, with flames bursting round him—­flung out into the wilderness and the woods, because Louis, after adding the flames to Bernini’s composition, finally pronounced the statue unworthy of himself and of the sacred enclosure of the Park.  So here, on the outer edge of Versailles, the crumbling failure rises, in exile to this day, without so much as a railing to protect it from the scribbling tourist who writes his name all over it.  In the realm of Art, it seemed, the King’s writ still ran, and the King’s doom stood.

Fenwick’s rhetorical sense was touched by the statue and its history.  He examined it, talking fast and well, Eugenie meanwhile winning from him all he had to give, by the simplest words and looks—­he the reed, and she the player.  His mind, his fancy, worked easily once more, under the stimulus of her presence.  His despondency began to give way.  He believed in himself—­felt himself an artist—­again.  The relief, physical and mental, was too tempting.  He flung himself upon it with reckless desire, incapable of denying himself, or of counting the cost.  And meanwhile, the effect of her black scarf, loosened, and eddying round her head and face in the soft night wind, defining their small oval, and the beauty of the brow, enchanted his painter’s eye.  There was a moment, just as they reentered the Park, when, as she stood looking at a moon-touched vista before them, the floating scarf suddenly recalled to him the outline of that lovely hood in which Romney framed the radiant head of Lady Hamilton as ‘The Sempstress.’