It was a photograph of Iris' head, nothing more; but it brought out every separate charm with an art which seemed to bring the living girl before the man who pored over the print with greedy eyes.
She was looking straight out from the photograph and in her face was that look of half-laughing, half-wistful tenderness which Anstice knew so well. Her lips were ever so slightly parted; and in her whole expression was something so vital as to be almost startling, as though some tinge of the sitter's personality had indeed been caught by the camera and imprisoned for ever in the picture. It was Iris as Anstice knew—and loved—her best: youth personified, yet with a womanliness, a gracious femininity, which seemed to promise a more than commonly attractive maturity.
And as he looked at the little picture, the presentment of the girl he loved caught and imprisoned by the magic of the sun, Anstice felt the full bitterness of his hopeless love surge over his soul in a flood whose onrush no philosophy could stem. To him Iris would always be the one desired woman in the world. No other woman, be she a hundred times more beautiful, could ever fill the place held in his heart by this grey-eyed girl. With her, life would have been a perpetual feast, a lingering sacrament. Her companionship would have been sufficient to turn the dull fare of ordinary life into the mysterious Bread and Wine which only lovers know; and with her beside him there had been no heights to which he might not have attained, no splendour of achievement, of renown, even of renunciation, which might not have been reached before the closing cadence which is death had ended, irrevocably, the symphony of life.
But not for him was this one supreme glory, the glory of an existence spent with her. She had chosen otherwise—for one fiercely rebellious moment he told himself he had been a fool, and worse, to enter on that infamous bargain with Bruce Cheniston—and henceforth he must put away all thoughts of her, must banish his dreams to that mysterious region where our lost hopes lie—never, so far as we can see, to come to fruition; unless, as some have thought, there shall be in another world a great and marvellous country where lost causes shall be retrieved, forlorn hopes justified, and the thousand and one pitiful mistakes we make in our earthly blindness rectified at last.
The door opened suddenly, and Sir Richard's voice smote cheerily on his ears.
"I've got the car, Anstice, and if you are ready——"
Anstice hastily replaced the photographs, face downwards on the table, and turned to Sir Richard with a trace of confusion in his manner.
"The car there? Oh, yes, I'm ready. You would like me to drive?"
"If you will—then Fletcher can stop at home. You'll come back to dinner with me, of course."