The two women hurried to the doorway.  They were frightened and disgusted.  Oliver Haddo was left alone with the snake-charmer.

5

Dr Porhoet had asked Arthur to bring Margaret and Miss Boyd to see him on Sunday at his apartment in the Ile Saint Louis; and the lovers arranged to spend an hour on their way at the Louvre.  Susie, invited to accompany them, preferred independence and her own reflections.

To avoid the crowd which throngs the picture galleries on holidays, they went to that part of the museum where ancient sculpture is kept.  It was comparatively empty, and the long halls had the singular restfulness of places where works of art are gathered together.  Margaret was filled with a genuine emotion; and though she could not analyse it, as Susie, who loved to dissect her state of mind, would have done, it strangely exhilarated her.  Her heart was uplifted from the sordidness of earth, and she had a sensation of freedom which was as delightful as it was indescribable.  Arthur had never troubled himself with art till Margaret’s enthusiasm taught him that there was a side of life he did not realize.  Though beauty meant little to his practical nature, he sought, in his great love for Margaret, to appreciate the works which excited her to such charming ecstasy.  He walked by her side with docility and listened, not without deference, to her outbursts.  He admired the correctness of Greek anatomy, and there was one statue of an athlete which attracted his prolonged attention, because the muscles were indicated with the precision of a plate in a surgical textbook.  When Margaret talked of the Greeks’ divine repose and of their blitheness, he thought it very clever because she said it; but in a man it would have aroused his impatience.

Yet there was one piece, the charming statue known as La Diane de Gabies, which moved him differently, and to this presently he insisted on going.  With a laugh Margaret remonstrated, but secretly she was not displeased.  She was aware that his passion for this figure was due, not to its intrinsic beauty, but to a likeness he had discovered in it to herself.

It stood in that fair wide gallery where is the mocking faun, with his inhuman savour of fellowship with the earth which is divine, and the sightless Homer.  The goddess had not the arrogance of the huntress who loved Endymion, nor the majesty of the cold mistress of the skies.  She was in the likeness of a young girl, and with collected gesture fastened her cloak.  There was nothing divine in her save a sweet strange spirit of virginity.  A lover in ancient Greece, who offered sacrifice before this fair image, might forget easily that it was a goddess to whom he knelt, and see only an earthly maid fresh with youth and chastity and loveliness.  In Arthur’s eyes Margaret had all the exquisite grace of the statue, and the same unconscious composure; and in her also breathed the spring odours of ineffable purity.  Her features