“Try just to tell me the reason which seems to you the strongest,” said Bertha.

“That’s very simple.  I thought I loved him, and I find I don’t.”

“Exactly.  But I hardly see how the change came about.”

“I will try to tell you,” replied Rosamund.  “It was that picture, ‘Sanctuary,’ that began it.  When I first saw it, it gave me a shock.  You know how I have always thought of him—­an artist living for his own idea of art, painting just as he liked, what pleased him, without caring for the public taste.  I got enthusiastic; and when I saw that he seemed to care for my opinion and my praise—­of course all the rest followed.  He told me about his life as an art student —­Paris, Rome, all that; and it was my ideal of romance.  He was very poor, sometimes so poor that he hardly had enough to eat, and this made me proud of him, for I felt sure he could have got money if he would have condescended to do inferior work.  Of course, as I too was poor, we could not think of marrying before his position improved.  At last he painted ‘Sanctuary.’  He told me nothing about it.  I came and saw it on the easel, nearly finished.  And—­this is the shocking thing—­I pretended to admire it.  I was astonished, pained—­yet I had the worldliness to smile and praise.  There’s the fault of my character.  At that moment, truth and courage were wanted, and I had neither.  The dreadful thing is to think that he degraded himself on my account.  If I had said at once what I thought, he would have confessed—­would have told me that impatience had made him untrue to himself.  And from that day; oh, this is the worst of all, Bertha—­he has adapted himself to what he thinks my lower mind and lower aims; he has consciously debased himself, out of thought for me.  Horrible!  Of course he believes in his heart that I was a hypocrite before.  The astonishing thing is that this didn’t cause him to turn cold to me.  He must have felt that, but somehow he overcame it.  All the worse!  The very fact that he still cared for me shows how bad my influence has been.  I feel that I have wrecked his life, Bertha—­and yet I cannot give him my own, to make some poor sort of amends.”

Bertha was listening with a face that changed from puzzled interest to wondering confusion.

“Good gracious!” she exclaimed when the speaker ceased.  “Is it possible to get into such entanglements of reasoning about what one thinks and feels?  It’s beyond me.  Oh they’re bringing the tea.  Perhaps a cup of tea will clear my wits.”

Rosamund at once began to speak of the landscape by Leader, which hung near them, and continued to do so even after the servant had withdrawn.  Her companion was silent, smiling now and then in an absent way.  They sipped tea.

“The tea is doing me so much good,” Bertha said, “I begin to feel equal to the most complicated reflections.  And so you really believe that Mr. Franks is on the way to perdition, and that you are the cause of it?”