The visitors paused—­to see Fenwick standing between them and a large canvas covered with the first ‘laying-in’ of an important subject.  The model, a thin, dark-faced fellow, was standing meekly on the spot to which Fenwick had motioned him, while the artist, palette on thumb, stood absorbed and frowning, his keen eye travelling from the man’s head to the canvas behind it.

Lord Findon smiled.  He was a clever amateur, and relished the details of the business.

‘Smells good!’ he said, in Eugenie’s ear, sniffing the scents of the studio.  ’Looks like a fine subject too.  And just now he’s king of it.  The torments are all ahead.  Hullo, Fenwick!—­may we come in?’

Fenwick turned sharply and saw them in the doorway.  He came to meet them with mingled pleasure and embarrassment.

‘Come in, please!  Hope you don’t mind this get-up.’  He pointed to his shirt-sleeves.

‘It’s we who apologise!’ smiled Eugenie.  ‘You are in a great moment!’

She glanced at the canvas, filled with a rhythmical group of dim figures, already beautiful, though they had caught the artist and his work in the very act of true creation—­when after weeks or months of brooding, of hard work, of searching study of this or that, of inspiration tested and verified, of mechanical drudgery, of patient construction, birth begins—­the birth of values, relations, distances, the drawing of colour.

Fenwick shrugged his shoulders.  His eyes sparkled in a strained and haggard face, with such an ardour that Eugenie had the strange impression of some headlong force, checked in mid-career, and filling the quiet studio with the thrill of its sudden reining-up; and Lord Findon’s announcement was checked on his lips.

‘Why, it is my subject!’ she cried, looking again at the picture.

‘Well, of course!’ said Fenwick, flushing.

It was only a few weeks before that she had read him, from a privately printed volume, a poem, of which the new, strange music was then freshly in men’s ears—­suggesting that he should take it as a theme.  The poem is called ’An Elegy on a Lady, whom grief for the death of her betrothed killed.’  Its noble verse summons all true maids and lovers to bear the dead company, in that burial procession which should have been her bridal triumph.  The priests go before, white-robed; the ‘dark-stoled minstrels follow’; then the bier with the bride:—­

  And then the maidens in a double row,
  Each singing soft and low,
  And each on high a torch upstaying: 
  Unto her lover lead her forth with light,
  With music, and with singing, and with praying.

‘Here is the finished sketch,’ he said, placing it in her hands and watching her eagerly.

She bent over it in emotion, conscious of that natural delight of woman when she has fired an artist.

‘How fine!—­and how you must have worked!’