Poor Martin's condition grew visibly worse. On the doctor's recommendation, he was transferred to the neighboring hospital, and the afflicted family reconciled themselves to the inevitable. Although the poor wife had tended him day and night with never-varying devotion, she could not but admit that she was not in a position to give him all that was required by the physician's directions.
Eugene, now the only support of the family, was obliged, in default of anything better, to take to retouching pictures for photographers. This ill-paid mechanical labor was beginning to have an injurious effect upon his imagination. The day-dreams which had filled his whole soul, anticipating his going to the Eternal City, to receive there the artist's consecration by studying the great masterpieces, he now saw vanishing into comfortless vacuity, replaced by nothing better than the dreamy monotony of earning his daily bread by hard and uninteresting work.
Lucy's meteoric appearance, however, had filled the darkened spirit of the young man with a cheering light. With fiery eagerness he began sketching the dear face which he had never been able to forget. The laboring mechanic disappeared, and the artist, once more awakened, felt his genius glow again with the desire to create. This girl, the very sight of whom made him tremble with joy, must not be allowed to lose her faith in his talent—his artistic capacity. In her eyes he wished to be that, which his dreams had promised he should be—a real artist, even if he were obliged to strain his powers to the very limit of the unattainable.
At the appointed hours Lucy came, bringing, like Schiller's 'Maiden from a foreign shore,' valuable gifts for his mother, with fruits and toys for the children. To Eugene, however, she brought the most fatal gift—a ray of that unsurpassable bitter-sweet pain which men call love, and which often ends only with life. After she had left the house all trace of her vanished; none of them knew whence she came or whither she went.
With each sitting Eugene grew into a condition of more blissful intoxication, although Lucy, in her refined unapproachableness, gave him not the slightest excuse for such a feeling. Only once he felt her thoughtful eyes resting upon him with an expression which sent the blood coursing madly through his veins.
IV.
One day when the picture was almost completed he received the following lines from her:
"I am going with my mother to Palm Beach, where we expect to spend a month or two. If my portrait is done before I come back, kindly send it to No. — Fifth Avenue. Remember me to your dear ones.
LUCY."