“I do love you.  You are like my life to me, but I know I ought not to marry you.  I should absorb you.  You would love me.  You would not want to be unfaithful to me.  But fidelity to one person is madness an impossibility to an artist if he is to reach his highest development.  It can’t be.  We must not think of it.”

The blood went to my head in great waves.  The supreme tenderness of a moment back seemed gone, her words had roused another phase of passion, the harsh fury of it.

“I don’t care about the art, I don’t care about anything.  You shall marry me.  I will make you love me.”

“You don’t understand.  If you were fifty-eight I would marry you directly.”

“You shall marry me before then,” I answered, and kissed her again and put my hands up to her soft-haired head to pull it down to my breast and dragged loose some of its soft coils.

“Trevor, you are mad.  Let me get up.”

I rose myself, and left her free to get up.  She sat up on the couch, white and trembling.

“Now you are going to say you won’t come to me any more, I suppose?” I said angrily.  The nervous excitement of the moment was so great; there was such a wild booming in my ears I could hardly hear my own voice.

She looked up.  The tears welled into her luminous blue eyes.

“How unkind you are! and how unjust!  Of course I shall come, must come every day if you want it till the Phryne is done.  You don’t know how I love you.”

I took her dear little hand and kissed it.

“I am sorry,” I said.  “Forgive me, but you must not say such stupid things.  Of course you will marry me; why, we are half married already.  Most people would say we ought to be.”

I turned on the lights and drew the table up to the fire, which I stirred, and began to make the tea.

Viola sat on the edge of the couch in silence, coiling up her hair.

She seemed very pale and tired, and I tried to soothe her with increased tenderness.  I made her a cup of tea and came and sat beside her while she drank it.  Then I put my arm round her waist and got her to lean against me, and put her soft fair-haired head down on my shoulder and rest there in silence.

I stroked one of her hands that lay cold and nerveless in her lap with my warm one.

“You have done so much for me,” I said softly; “wonderful things which I can never forget, and now you must belong to me altogether.  No two people could love each other more than we do.  It would be absurd of us not to marry.”  I kissed her, and she accepted my caresses and did not argue with me any more; so I felt happier, and when she rose to leave our good-bye was very tender, our last kiss an ecstasy.

When she had gone I picked up one of the sketches I had first made of her and gazed long at it.

How extravagantly I had come to love her now.  I realised in those moments how strong this passion was that had grown up, as it were, under cover of the work, and that I had not fully recognised till now.