had ever loved me before.  I know she took possession of me, body and soul.  I married her.  I would just as willingly have jumped into the Seine with her if she had preferred it.  For three months we lived together while I finished the picture which I called the Priestess of Delphi, painted from my drawings of her in her agony.  The picture made a great noise in Paris, and brought me some new friends, among the rest one who, I think, really saved me from Charenton.  Hazard called at my studio just as my troubles were beginning to tear me to pieces.  My wife had the temper of a fury, and all the vices of Paris.  Excitement was her passion; she could not stand the quiet of an artist’s life; yet her Bohemian instincts came over her only in waves, and when they left her in peace she still had splendid qualities that held me to her.  Hazard came in upon us one day in the middle of a terrible scene when she was threatening again to take her own life, and trying, or pretending to try to take mine.  When he came in, she disappeared.  The next I heard of her, she was back on the stage—­lost!  I was worn out; my nervous system was all gone.  Then Hazard came to my help and took me off with him to the south of Europe.  Our first stage was to Avignon and Vaucluse, and there I found how curiously my experience had affected my art.  I had learned to adore purity and repose, but I could never get hold of my ideal.  Fifty times I tried to draw Laura as I wanted to realize her and every time I failed.  I knew the secret of Petrarch and I could not tell it.  My wife came between me and my thought.  All life took form in my hands as a passion.  If I could learn again to paint a child, or any thing that had not the world in its eyes, I should be at peace at last.”

As he paused here, and seemed again to be musing over St. Cecilia, Esther’s curiosity made her put in a word,

“And your wife?”—­she asked.

“My wife?” he repeated in his abstracted tone, “I never saw her again till this morning when I met her on the steps of the church.”

“Then it was your wife?” cried Catherine.

“You saw her?” he asked with a touch of bitterness.  “I won’t ask what you thought of her.”

“I knew her by her eyes,” cried Catherine.  “I thought she meant to shoot you, and when you came in I was just going to warn you.  Now you see, Esther, I was right.”

Wharton leaned over and took Catherine’s hand.  “Thank you,” said he.  “I believe you are my good angel.  But you remind me of what I came to say.  The woman is quite capable of that or of any other scandal, and of course Hazard’s church must not be exposed to such a risk.  I shall come here no longer for the present, neither must you.  I am bound to take care of my friends.”

“But you!” said Esther.  “What are you going to do?”

“I?  Nothing!  What can I do?”

“Do you mean,” said Catherine, with a comical fierceness in her voice as though she wanted herself to take the French actress in hand, “do you mean to let that woman worry you how she likes?”