Fenwick was silent.  Madame de Pastourelles, feeling that for the moment she also had come to the end of her tether, fell into a reverie, from which she was presently roused by finding Fenwick standing before her, palette in hand.

‘I don’t want you to think me an envious brute,’ he said, stammering.  ‘Of course, I know the “Polyxena” is a fine thing—­a very fine thing.’

She looked a little surprised—­as though he offered her moods to which she had no key.  ‘Shall I show you something I like much better?’ she said, with quick resource.  And drawing towards her a small portfolio she had brought with her, she took out a drawing and handed it to him.  ‘I am taking it to be framed.  Isn’t it beautiful?’

It was a drawing, in silver-point, of an orange-tree in mingled fruit and bloom—­an exquisite piece of work, of a Japanese truth, intricacy, and perfection.  Fenwick looked at it in silence.  These silver-point drawings of Welby’s were already famous.  In the preceding May there had been an exhibition of them at an artistic club.  At the top of the drawing was an inscription in a minute handwriting—­’Sorrento:  Christmas Day,’ with the monogram ‘A.W.’ and a date three years old.

As Madame de Pastourelles perceived that his eyes had caught the inscription, she rather hastily withdrew the sketch and returned it to the portfolio.

‘I watched him draw it,’ she explained—­’in a Sorrento garden.  My father and I were there for the winter.  Mr. Welby was in a villa near ours, and I used to watch him at work.’

It seemed to Fenwick that her tone had grown rather hurried and reserved, as though she regretted the impulse which had made her show him the drawing.  He praised it as intelligently as he could; but his mind was guessing all the time at the relation which lay behind the drawing.  According to Cuningham’s information, it was now three years since a separation had been arranged between Madame de Pastourelles and her husband, Comte Albert de Pastourelles, owing to the Comte’s outrageous misconduct.  Lord Findon had no doubt taken her abroad after the catastrophe.  And, besides her father, Welby had also been near, apparently—­watching over her?

He returned to his work upon the hands, silent, but full of speculation.  The evident bond between these two people had excited his imagination and piqued his curiosity from the first moment of his acquaintance with them.  They were both of a rare and fine quality; and the signs of an affection between them, equally rare and fine, had not been lost on those subtler perceptions in Fenwick which belonged perhaps to his heritage as an artist.  If he gave the matter an innocent interpretation, and did not merely say to himself, ’She has lost a husband and found a lover,’ it was because the woman herself had awakened in him fresh sources of judgement.  His thoughts simply did not dare besmirch her.

* * * * *