Do you remember?  Have I quoted correctly?  Yes, here it is!’ taking down a volume entitled Liber Amoris, the passionate confession which had first brought the poet his fame.  As a matter of fact, several ladies had ‘stood’ for this series, but the poet had artfully generalised them into one supreme Madonna, whom Annette believed to be herself.  Indeed, she had furnished the warmest and the most tragic colouring.  Rondel, however, had for some time kept his address a secret from Annette.  But the candle set upon a hill cannot be hid:  fame has its disadvantages.  To a man with creditors or any other form of ‘a past,’ it is no little dangerous to have his portrait in the Review of Reviews.  A well-known publisher is an ever-present danger.  By some such means Annette had found her poet.  The papers could not be decorated with reviews of his verse, and she not come across some of them.  Indeed, she had, with burning cheek and stormy bosom, recognised herself in many an intimate confession.  It was her hair, her face, all her beauty, he sang, though the poems were dedicated to another.

She turned to another passage as she stood there—­’How pretty it sounds in poetry!’ she said, and began to read:—­

    ’"There in the odorous meadowsweet afternoon,
        With the lark like the dream of a song in the dreamy blue,
      All the air abeat with the wing and buzz of June,
        We met—­she and I, I and she,” [You and I, I and you.]
     “And there, while the wild rose and woodbine deliciousness blended,
      We kissed and we kissed and we kissed, till the afternoon ended...."’

Here Rondel at last interrupted—­

‘Woman!’ he said, ’are your cheeks so painted that you have lost all sense of shame?’ But she had her answer—­

’Man! are you so great that you have lost the sense of pity?  And which is the greater shame:  to publish your sins in large paper and take royalties for them, or to speak of them, just you and I together, you and I, as “there in the odorous meadowsweet afternoon"?’

‘Look you,’ she continued, ’an artist pays his model at least a shilling an hour, and it is only her body he paints:  but you use body and soul, and offer her nothing.  Your blues and reds are the colours you have stolen from her eyes and her heart—­stolen, I say, for the painter pays so much a tube for his colours, so much an hour for his model, but you—­’

‘I give you immortality.  Poor fly, I give you amber,’ modestly suggested the poet.

But Annette repeated the word ‘Immortality!’ with a scorn that almost shook the poet’s conceit, and thereupon produced an account, which ran as follows:—­

’Mr. Hyacinth Rondel
                   Dr. to Miss Annette Jones,
     For moiety of the following royalties:—­
Moonshine and Meadowsweet, 500 copies. 
Coral and Bells, 750 copies. 
Liber Amoris, 3 editions, 3,000 copies. 
Forbidden Fruit, 5 editions, 5,000 copies.
                              -------
                               9,250 copies at 1s.
                                      = L462, 10s. 
     Moiety of same due to Miss Jones, L231, 5s.’