“It’s early yet.  Come and have supper somewhere with me, you had a wretched dinner.”

Anything to keep her with me for an hour longer!  Any excuse to put off, to delay that frightful wrench that seems to tear out the inside of both body and soul which parting from her to-night would mean.

“Do you want me to come to the studio with you afterwards?” she asked.

I looked back at her with my heart beating violently.  Her face was very pale, and the pupils in her eyes dilated.

We had moved through the throng and passed outside.

The night was fine.  We walked on, looking out for a disengaged hansom.  I could hardly breathe:  my heart seemed stifling me.  What was in her mind?  What would the next few minutes mean for us both?

My brain swam.  My thoughts went round in dizzying circles.

“We shan’t have time for supper and to go to the studio as well,” I answered quietly.

“I don’t think I want any supper,” she replied.

A sudden joy like a great flame leapt through me as I caught the words.

A crawling hansom came up.  I hailed it and put her in and sprang in beside her, full of that delight that touches in its intensity upon agony.  “Westbourne Street,” I called to the man.  “No. 2, The Studio.”

CHAPTER V

THE CALL OF THE CUCKOO

I stood looking through the window of my studio thinking.

The worst had happened, or the best, whichever it was.  Viola had become my mistress.  She had resolutely refused to be my wife, and the alternative had followed of necessity.  The picture had brought us together, it held us together.  I could not separate from her without sacrificing the picture, and so destroying her happiness, as she said, and rendering useless all that she had done for me so far.

The picture forced us into an intimacy from which I could not escape and which, now that the devastating clutch of passion had seized me, I could not endure unless she became my own.  Viola had seen this and given me herself as unhesitatingly as she had at first given me her beauty for the picture.

In her relations with me she seemed to reach the highest point of unselfishness possible to the human character.  For I felt that it was to me and for me she had surrendered herself, not to her own passion nor for her own pleasure.

She would have come day after day and sat to me, shewed me herself and delighted in that self’s-reproduction on the canvas, talked to me, delighted in our common worship of beauty, accepted my caresses and—­for herself—­wanted nothing more.

I had worked well in the past fortnight since the night of the theatre, not so well perhaps as in that first clear period of inspiration, of purely artistic life when Viola was to me nothing but the beautiful Greek I was creating on my canvas, but still, well.