I sprang forward, full of self-reproach.  How foolish I had been!  So unnecessarily harsh!  I went to her.  In obedience to my order, she had put some of her clothes on, and now lay there senseless apparently and quite white, her arms, still bare, stretched out on the floor beside her.  She looked so pretty, so small, round, and helpless, that my heart went out to her.  I felt I had been such a brute.  As I stooped over her to raise her I saw the great crimson bruises I had left on her arms.

I picked her up and put her on the couch.  She lay there quite still, pale, her eyes closed, unconscious.

I pushed the hair off her forehead, and, dipping my handkerchief into a glass of water on the table, pressed it on to her head.  I was kneeling by the couch.  The sweet, little, rounded face, the soft unconscious body lay just beneath my eyes.

She opened her eyes slowly: 

“Trevor, do forgive me,” she whispered, and smiled up at me just a little, opening the curved lips; “do say you forgive me, give me one kiss.”

In the violent reaction of feeling, in the torrent of self-reproach for being so hard on a child like this, the senses conquered, I put my head down, and kissed her passionately, far more passionately from that great reaction of preceding anger, on her lips.

“Dear, dear little girl, are you better?”

She threw her arms round me.

“Oh, Trevor, I do love you so, I do love you, I do love you.”

Full of that great delight, so transient, so baseless, so unreasoning, yet so great, which the senses give us, of that passion in which the mind has no part, that passes over us as the wind ruffles the surface of the lake without moving the depths below, I kissed her over and over again, and pressed her to me, soft shoulders and undone hair and wounded arms.

The next moment the vision of Viola came before my brain, and I rose to my feet.  Veronica caught at my hand, and, raising it to her lips, kissed it in a tempest of passion.  I drew it away—­

“Get up and finish your dressing,” I said very gently.  “This sort of thing can do you no good, Veronica.  It will only mean that I cannot let you come to the studio at all.”

Veronica rose from the couch obediently and resumed her dressing.  She gave me somehow the impression she was satisfied at having broken down my self-control, and hoped to win me over further by extreme docility.  I walked away to the window, angry with myself, and yet angry again that that anger should be necessary.  I had always been so free till now, able to gratify the fancy of the moment.  This need for self-restraint was new and irritating.

Veronica came up to me when she was dressed, and asked for a parting kiss.  I gave it, and she went away with a demure and sad little sigh.

When I came down from the studio I went at once to our bedroom to dress.  We were dining early and going out after, and I knew I had not much time.  Viola was not there; she had dressed evidently and gone down.  Sometimes she would be sitting in the armchair at the foot of the bed waiting for me, but to-night she had gone down.