PAUL had gone on bravely with his life. He knew that when Sara had gone out of his studio into the summer night she had taken something away with her, the something that was the best part of himself. But with what remained to him he had set himself to face the lonely months ahead of him. Each morning as he woke he told himself that he would work for her. It was the only thing that made work possible to him.  
His joy in art had been sufficient for him until he met her. Her coming had increased it ten-thousandfold, as it had increased his whole joy in life and in beauty, giving it a meaning he had never before realized. And when she went she had taken it away, leaving him with nothing but the husk.
 
In spite of his courage, loneliness at times seemed as if it must overwhelm him, for now it was unlike his former loneliness. Before, he had not known what it was to have the perfect companionship of a woman. Now he had known it and lost it. And the years before him stretched very grey. He tried to see a gleam of gold in the future, but it was too far off for him to perceive it by sight; he could only tell himself in faith that one day it would dawn through the greyness. But however strong the spirit may be to have faith, the flesh after all is human and weak, and his loneliness pressed hard upon him. During the last weeks, too, he had had only one commission—an uninteresting one, which he had nevertheless accepted. He would now, as he had said, have painted anyone however commonplace. But the work had not taken him in any degree out of himself.
 
On the afternoon of the fourteenth of October he was sitting alone in his studio. It had been a bad day for him—one of the days that come to all artists when hand and brain alike refuse to work, when inspiration is lacking, and it seems as if her light had departed for ever.
 
He looked round the room. There was rather a neglected appearance about it. He had given up his man as an extravagance he could not possibly afford, and he was on the look-out for a tenant for his studio, meaning to move into something much smaller. Yet, in spite of the neglected look of the studio, Paul himself was as well groomed as ever. Personal cleanliness was an ingrained characteristic of him. It belonged to him as much as it belonged to the French aristocrats who manicured their nails while waiting in the Bastille for the tumbrils that would take them to the scaffold and the embrace of the guillotine.
 
After a time he got up from his chair, and taking the kettle from the stove, he made some tea. As he did so he thought of the many times Sara had had tea with him since the day in Battersea Park.
 
Everything he did or thought reminded him of her. The tiniest and most trivial details recalled her—even a thing as insignificant as the crack in the table. He remembered seeing her run her finger along it one day when she had been sitting in the chair opposite to him, which chair was now empty. The tea-cups reminded him. He had bought them specially for her. Before that he had only possessed two cracked ones and a tumbler............