She made a sign of assent, and as he grasped her hand, she allowed herself a moment’s pause.  Her eyes rested—­just perceptibly—­on the face of the man whose long devotion to her, expressed through every phase of delicate and passionate service, had brought them both at last to that point where feeling knows itself—­where illusions die away—­and the deep foundations of our life appear.

Welby’s dark face quivered.  In the touch of his friend’s hand, in the look of her eyes there was that which told him that she had bidden him to no common meeting.  The air between them was in an instant alive with memories.  Days of first youth; youth’s high impressions of great and lovely things; all the innocent, stingless joys of art and travel, of happy talk and ripening faculty, of pure ambitions, hero-worships, compassions, shared and mutually enkindled:  these were for ever intertwined with their thoughts of each other.

But much more than these!

For him, the unspoken agony of loss suffered when she married; for her, the memories of her marriage, of the dreary languor into which its wreck had plunged her, and of the gradual revival in her of the old intellectual pleasures, the old joys of the spirit, under the influence of Arthur’s life and Arthur’s companionship.  How simply he had offered all that his art, his tact, his genius had to give!—­and how pitifully, how hungrily she had leaned upon it!  It had seemed so natural.  Her own mind was clear, her own pulses calm; their friendship had appeared a thing apart, and she was able to feel, with sincerity and dignity, that if she received much, she also gave much—­the hours of relief and pleasure which ease the labour, the inevitable torment of the artist, all that protecting environment which a woman’s sweet and agile wit can build around a man’s taxed brain or ruffled nerves.  To chat with her, in success or failure; to be sure of her welcome, her smile at all times; to ask her sympathy in matters where he had himself trained in her the faculty of response; to rouse in her the gentle, diffident humour which seemed to him a much rarer and more distinguished thing than other women’s brilliance; to watch the ways of a personality which appeared to many people a little cold, pale, and over-refined, and was to him supreme distinction; to search for pleasures for her, as a botanist hunts rare flowers; to save her from the most trifling annoyance, if time and brains could do it;—­these things, for three years, had made the charm of Welby’s life.  And Eugenie knew it—­knew it with an affectionate gratitude that had for long seemed both to her and to the world the last word of their situation on both sides—­a note, a tone, which could always be evoked from it, touch or strike it where you would.

And now?