She retraced her steps.
'Well, it's a picture, I think, sir.'
He held out his hand for it, took it, and instantly withdrew into the studio and again locked the door. She noticed that he seemed to have lit one candle in the big studio, and his manner struck her as strange. But her slow mind followed the matter no further, and she went back to the cooking of his slender supper.
Fenwick meanwhile was standing with the parcel in his hand. At the woman's knock he had risen from a table, where he had been writing a letter. A black object, half-covered with a painting-rag, lay beside the ink-stand.
'I must make haste,' he thought, 'or she will be bothering me again.'
He looked at the letter, which was still unfinished. Meanwhile he had absently deposited the parcel on the floor, where it rested against the leg of the table.
'Another page will finish it. Hôtel Bristol, Rome—till the end of the week?—if I only could be sure that was what Butlin said!'
He paced up and down, frowning, in an impotent distress, trying to make his brain work as usual. On his visit of the afternoon he had asked the lawyers for the Findon's address; but his memory now was of the worst.
Suddenly he wheeled round, sat down, and took up a book which had been lying face downwards on the table. It was the 'Memoirs of Benjamin Haydon,' and he opened it at one of the last pages—
'About an hour after, Miss Haydon entered the painting-room, and found her father stretched out dead, before the easel on which stood, blood-sprinkled, his unfinished picture. A portrait of his wife stood on a smaller easel facing his large picture.'