The two men nodded.

“Now for the other,” said Ayre.  “By Jove!  I feel as if I’d been in church.”

“The other I got only three or four days ago.  Again I was a Paul Pry,—­we have to be, you know, if we’re to do anything worth doing,—­and I took him while he sat.  But I dare say you’d better see it first.”

He took another and smaller picture and placed it on the easel, standing for a moment between it and the onlookers and studying it closely.  Then he stepped aside in silence.

It was merely a head—­nothing more—­standing out boldly from a dark background.  The face was again Stafford’s, but the presentment differed strangely.  It was still beautiful; it had even a beauty the other had not, the beauty of youth and passion.  The devotee was gone; in his place was a face that, in spite of the ascetic cast of feature, was so lighted up with the fire of love and longing that it might have stood for a Leander or a Romeo.  It expressed an eager yearning, that made it seem to be craning out of the picture in the effort to reach that unknown object on which the eyes were fixed with such devouring passion.

The men sat looking at it in amazement.  Eugene was half angry, half alarmed.  Ayre was closely studying the picture, his old look of cynical amusement struggling with a surprise which it was against his profession to admit.  They forgot to praise the picture; but Morewood was well content with their tacit homage.

“The finest thing I ever did—­on my life; one of the finest things any one ever did,” he murmured; “and I can’t show it!”

“No,” said Eugene.

Ayre rose and took his stand before the picture.  Then he got a chair, choosing the lowest he could find, and sat down, sitting well back.  This attitude brought him exactly under the gaze of the eyes.

“Is it your diabolic fancy,” he said, “or did you honestly copy it?”

“I never struck closer to what I saw,” the painter replied.  “It’s not my doing; he looked like that.”

“Then who was sitting, as it were, where I am now?”

“Yes,” said Morewood.  “I thought you couldn’t miss it.”

“Who was it?” asked Eugene, in an excited way.

The others looked keenly at him for a moment.

“You know,” said Morewood.  “Claudia Territon.  She was sitting there reading.  He had a book, too, but had laid it down on his knee.  She sat reading, and he looking.  In a moment I caught the look.  Then she put down the book; and as she turned to him to speak, in a second it was gone, and he was not this picture nor the other, but as we know him every day.”

“She didn’t see?” asked Eugene.

“No.”

“Thank God!” he cried.  Then in a moment, recollecting himself, he looked at the two men, and saw what he had done.  They tried to look as if they noticed nothing.

“You must destroy that thing, Morewood,” said he.