The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was not yet ten o’clock.  To gratify her passionate curiosity she now made her preparations, first getting rid of superfluous garments and putting on her dressing-gown, then arranging a chair in front of the table and reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest utterances.  Then she fetched the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, took out the likeness, and set it up before her.

It was a striking countenance to look upon.  The poet wore a luxuriant black moustache and imperial, and a slouched hat which shaded the forehead.  The large dark eyes, described by the landlady, showed an unlimited capacity for misery; they looked out from beneath well-shaped brows as if they were reading the universe in the microcosm of the confronter’s face, and were not altogether overjoyed at what the spectacle portended.

Ella murmured in her lowest, richest, tenderest tone:  ’And it’s you who’ve so cruelly eclipsed me these many times!’

As she gazed long at the portrait she fell into thought, till her eyes filled with tears, and she touched the cardboard with her lips.  Then she laughed with a nervous lightness, and wiped her eyes.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three children, to let her mind stray to a stranger in this unconscionable manner.  No, he was not a stranger!  She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself; considering that he had to provide for family expenses.

’He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,’ she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table at the bedside, and when she was reclining on the pillow she re-read those of Robert Trewe’s verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true.  Putting these aside, she set up the photograph on its edge upon the coverlet, and contemplated it as she lay.  Then she scanned again by the light of the candle the half-obliterated pencillings on the wall-paper beside her head.  There they were—­phrases, couplets, bouts-rimes, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas in the rough, like Shelley’s scraps, and the least of them so intense, so sweet, so palpitating, that it seemed as if his very breath, warm and loving, fanned her cheeks from those walls, walls that had surrounded his head times and times as they surrounded her own now.  He must often have put up his hand so—­with the pencil in it.  Yes, the writing was sideways, as it would be if executed by one who extended his arm thus.

These inscribed shapes of the poet’s world,

   ’Forms more real than living man,
   Nurslings of immortality,’