“Miss Regan.”
Matthew felt a great wave of affection for his cousin.
“But why don’t you paint her?”
“She wouldn’t sit. I had to ask her friend, knowing she’d accompany her. But I’m half sorry I undertook it now.”
“You’re certainly not doing her justice!”
There was still plenty of light. He took up the brush, and within a quarter of an hour Mrs. Wyndwood’s sweetly spiritual face gleamed unmistakably upon the canvas. Herbert watched with admiration those sure, swift strokes, behind which lay so arduous a training, so irrepressible an instinct.
“You seem to have her face by heart,” he said at last, with a suspicious twinkle. “But don’t let me interrupt you.” And lighting a cigarette, he threw himself on a lounge in an attitude that curiously recalled old times to the painter.
Matthew Strang painted on lovingly till he could no longer see his palette, then Herbert took him to his new club—the Epicurean—and gave him a delightful dinner for his pains, and over the kümmel and the coffee borrowed a hundred pounds from him so as not to sell out a stock that was depreciated for the moment.
CHAPTER V
A CELEBRITY AT HOME
Herbert Strang had gone down to Devonshire to finish his portrait of Mrs. Wyndwood, whose dress was still unrecognizable, and who was so agreeably surprised by the face that she graciously consented to continue the sittings at the “Creamery.” Matthew had arranged to join him—on the excellent pretext of keeping his old friend company—but before he left town for his holiday, Conscience began working hard, ominously presageful of the complications that might spring up in the solitudes of hills and waters. The inner voice whispered strenuously to him to profit by Eleanor’s absence to fight down his impossible passion, not intensify it unendurably by following in her train. Thoughts of his wife began to haunt him—thoughts which, while he was only an absentee husband, had been but pale shadows of remorse, dogging his few unoccupied moments, but which, now that another woman had at last enthroned herself in the vacant temple of his soul, assumed shapes more solid and insistent. Home plucked at his heart, subtly transformed to something more than an unpleasant recollection. In a spasm of compunction and foreboding, he resolved to pay a visit to his wife to strengthen himself against temptation. The idea, once conceived, drove him to instant execution. Ere the train had drawn up at Camden Town he had determined to elude temptation altogether by accompanying his own family on its annual jaunt.