* * * * *

When all the guests were gone, when Gerald and Delorme had smoked their last interminable cigars, and Delorme had made his last mocking comments on the “old masters” who adorned the smoking-room, Tatham saw him safely to bed, and returned to his sitting-room on the ground floor.  The French window was open, and he passed out into the garden.  Soon, in his struggle with himself, he had left the garden and the park behind, and was climbing the slope of the fells.  The play of the soft summer winds under the stars, the scents of bracken and heather and rushes, the distant throbbing sounds that rose from the woods as the wind travelled through them—­and soon, the short mountain turf beneath his feet, and around and below him, the great shapes of the hills, mysteriously still, and yet, as it seemed to him, mysteriously alive—­these things spoke to him and, little by little, calmed his blood.

It was the first anguish of a happy man.  When, presently, he lay safe hidden in a hollow of the lonely fell, face downward among the moonlit rocks, some young and furious tears fell upon the sod.  That quiet strength of will in so soft a creature—­a will opposed to his will—­had brought him up against the unyieldingness of the world.  The joyous certainties of life were shaken to their base; and yet he could not, he did not, cease to hope.

XI

Victoria was sitting to Delorme in a corner of the Italian garden.  He wished to paint her en plein air, and he was restlessly walking to and fro, about her, choosing a point of view.  Victoria was vaguely pleased by the picturesqueness of his lion head set close on a pair of powerful shoulders, no less than by the vivacity of his dark face and southern gesture.  He wore a linen jacket with bulging pockets, and a black skullcap, which gave him a masterful, pontifical air.  To Victoria’s thinking, indeed, he “pontified” at all times, a great deal more than was necessary.

However she sat resigned.  She did not like Delorme, and her preference was all for another school of art.  She had moreover a critical respect for her own features, and she did not want at all to see them rendered by what seemed to her the splashing violence of Delorme’s brushwork.  But Harry had asked it of her, and here she was.

Her thoughts, moreover, were full of Harry’s affairs, so that the conversation between her and the painter was more or less pretence on her part.

Delorme, meanwhile, was divided between the passion of a new subject and the wrath excited in him by a newspaper article which had reached him at breakfast.

“A little more to the left, please, Lady Tatham.  Admirable!  One moment!” The scrabble of charcoal on paper.

Delorme stepped back.  Victoria sat languidly passive.