“Good night.”
As he held the door open, and as she passed out, he realized that, during the last few months, his faith in the goodness of God—the old simple faith of his childhood—had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish hands from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, it had been returned.
It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put it back.
Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned on the electric light in her sitting room, and sat down at once to write to the friend who was a friend of Pugin’s.
This friend was Sabatier.
She had studied art under him, and between artist and pupil lay that mysterious bond which unites craftsmen. For Maxine was great in knowledge and power, and above all in that instinct without which an artist is at best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion of mechanical force.
As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy burning in her heart and moving to eloquence her pen, was a thing born not from the sufferings of an afflicted people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind begotten by the man she had just left, and whom, that night, she had learned to love.