It was a sitting-room on the second floor which the artist occupied, by no means an uncomfortable apartment, though Eve’s first impression of it was immeasurably sordid, and she realized, with a touch of pity, that the painter’s difficult genius had no tact of application to his surroundings.

Had, then, the painter of “Thanatos the Peacebearer”—­that incomparable work!—­no personal taste, to be violated by the crude wall-paper and the vulgar vases, containing impossible flowers, which jostled against broken tobacco-pipes and a half empty bottle of milk on the mantelpiece?

There was an immense untidiness everywhere; a disorder of children’s toys and torn picture-books would have prepared Eve for the discovery of a sleeping child with brilliant hair coiled up in a rug on the sofa, if her eyes had not been arrested by an unframed canvas on an easel, the only picture, save some worthless prints in common gilt frames, which was visible.  It was the head of Philip Rainham, immortalized by the brush of his friend, which awaited her—­the eyes already closed, the pale lips still smiling with that superbly ironical smile of the dead.

She had not greeted Oswyn on her entrance, and now she had ceased to remember that he was there, as she stood contemplating the portrait with her rapt and sorrowful gaze, while Oswyn, leaning across the table, implicitly accepting the situation, which had to him all the naturalness of the unexpected, considered her in his turn.

He had never before seen her to such advantage, and, remembering that early presentment of her which Lightmark had exhibited in the Grosvenor, he realized how much she had developed.  The singular nobility and purity of her beauty amazed him; it shone out like the starry night; and, standing there remote and silent (in her abstraction she had let her cloak slide to the ground, revealing her white arms, her fanciful, incongruous attire), she seemed, indeed, a creature of another world.

When she turned to him at last there was an immense and solemn entreaty in her eyes for candour and directness, an appeal to be spared no bitter knowledge that he might possess—­for the whole truth.

“Tell me,” she began slowly, calmly, though he was not ignorant that her composure was the result of an immense inward effort.  “I can’t explain why I have come to you—­perhaps you yourself can explain that better than I. I don’t know what you may think of me—­I am too unhappy to care.  I have no claim upon you.  I only entreat you to answer me a question which perhaps no one now living can answer but you.  Ah!”—­she broke off with a gesture of sudden passion—­“I have been so cruelly kept in the dark.”

Oswyn lowered his eyes for a moment, considering.  A curious wave of reminiscence swept over him, giving to this strange juxtaposition the last touch of completion.

He remembered Rainham’s long reticence, and his unburdening himself at the last, in a conviction that there would be a season when the truth would be best.  And he said to himself that this time had come.