ON the next morning, Winterfield arrived alone at Romayne’s house.

Having been included, as a matter of course, in the invitation to see the pictures, Father Benwell had made an excuse, and had asked leave to defer the proposed visit. From his point of view, he had nothing further to gain by being present at a second meeting between the two men — in the absence of Stella. He had it on Romayne’s own authority that she was in constant attendance on her mother, and that her husband was alone. “Either Mrs. Eyrecourt will get better, or she will die,” Father Benwell reasoned. “I shall make constant inquiries after her health, and, in either case, I shall know when Mrs. Romayne returns to Ten Acres Lodge. After that domestic event, the next time Mr. Winterfield visits Mr. Romayne, I shall go and see the pictures.”

It is one of the defects of a super-subtle intellect to trust too implicitly to calculation, and to leave nothing to chance. Once or twice already Father Benwell had been (in the popular phrase) a little too clever — and chance had thrown him out. As events happened, chance was destined to throw him out once more.

Of the most modest pretensions, in regard to numbers and size, the pictures collected by the late Lady Berrick were masterly works of modern art. With few exceptions, they had been produced by the matchless English landscape painters of half a century since. There was no formal gallery here. The pictures were so few that they could be hung in excellent lights in the different living-rooms of the villa. Turner, Constable, Collins, Danby, Callcott, Linnell — the master of Beaupark House passed from one to the other with the enjoyment of a man who thoroughly appreciated the truest and finest landscape art that the world has yet seen.

“You had better not have asked me here,” he said to Romayne, in his quaintly good-humored way. “I can’t part with those pictures when I say good-by to-day. You will find me calling here again and again, till you are perfectly sick of me. Look at this sea piece. Who thinks of the brushes and palette of that painter? There, truth to Nature and poetical feeling go hand in hand together. It is absolutely lovely — I could kiss that picture.”

They were in Romayne’s study when this odd outburst of enthusiasm escaped Winterfield. He happened to look toward the writing-table next. Some pages of manuscript, blotted and interlined with corrections, at once attracted his attention.

“Is that the forthcoming history?” he asked. “You are not one of the authors who perform the process of correction mentally — you revise and improve with the pen in your hand.”

Romayne looked at him in surprise. “I suspect, Mr. Winterfield, you have used your pen for other purposes than writing letters.”

“No, indeed; you pay me an undeserved compliment. When you come to see me in Devonshire, I can show you some manuscripts, and corrected proofs, left by our great writers, collected by my father. My knowledge of the secrets of the craft has been gained by examining those literary treasures. If the public only knew that every writer worthy of the name is the severest critic of his own book before it ever gets into the hands of the reviewers, how surprised they would be! The man who has worked in the full fervor of composition yesterday is the same man who sits in severe and merciless judgment to-day on what he has himself produced. What a fascination there must be in the Art which exacts and receives such double labor as this?”

Romayne thought — not unkindly — of his wife. Stella had once asked him how long a time he was usually occupied in writing one page. The reply had filled her with pity and wonder. “Why do you take all that trouble?” she had gently remonstrated. “It would be just the same to the people, darling, if you did it in half the time.”

By way of changing the topic, Romayne led his visitor into another room. “I have a picture here,” he said, “which belongs to a newer school of painting. You have been talking of hard work in one Art; there it is in another.”

“Yes,” said Winterfield, “there it is — the misdirected hard work, which has been guided by no critical faculty, and which doesn’t know where to stop. I try to admire it; and I end in pitying the poor artist. Look at that leafless felled tree in the middle distance. Every little twig, on the smallest branch, is conscientiously painted — and the result is like a colored photograph. You don’t look at a landscape as a series of separate parts; you don’t discover every twig on a tree; you see the whole in Nature, and you want to see the whole in a picture. That canvas presents a triumph of patience and pains, produced exactly as a piece of embroidery is produced, all in little separate bits, worked with the same mechanically complete care. I turn away from it to your shrubbery there, with an ungrateful sense of relief.”

He walked to the window as he spoke. It looked out on the grounds in front of the house. At the same moment the noise of rolling wheels became audible on the drive. An open carriage appeared at the turn in the road. Winterfield called Romayne to the window. “A visitor,” he began — and suddenly drew back, without saying a word more.

Romayne looked out, and recognized his wife.

“Excuse me for one moment,” he said, “it is Mrs. Romayne.”

On that morning an improvement in the fluctuating state of Mrs. Eyrecourt’s health had given Stella another of those opportunities of passing an hour or two with her husband, which she so highly prized. Romayne withdrew, to meet her at the door — too hurriedly to notice Winterfield standing, in the corner to which he had retreated, like a man petrified.

Stella had got out of the carriage when her husband reached the porch. She ascended the few steps that led to the hall as slowly and painfully as if she had been an infirm old woman. The delicately tinted color in her face had faded to an ashy white. She had seen Winterfield at the window.

For the moment, Romayne looked at her in speechless consternation. He led her into the nearest room that opened out of the hall, and took her in his arms. “My love, this nursing of your mother has completely broken you down!” he said, with the tenderest pity for her. “If you won’t think of yourself, you must think of me. For my sake remain here, and take the rest that you need. I will be a tyrant, Stella, for the first time; I won’t let you go back.”

She roused herself, and tried to smile — and hid the sad result from him in a kiss. “I do feel the anxiety and fatigue,” she said. “But my mother is really improving; and, if it only continues, the blessed sense of relief will make me strong again.” She paused, and roused all her courage, in anticipation of the next words — so trivial and so terrible — that must, sooner or later, be pronounced. “You have a visitor?” she said.

“Did you see him at the window? A really delightful man — I know you will like him. Under any other circumstances, I should have introduced him. You are not well enough to see strangers today.”

She was too determined to prevent Winterfield from ever entering the house again to shrink from the meeting. “I am not so ill as you think, Lewis,” she said, bravely. “When you go to your new friend, I will go with you. I am a little tired — that’s all.”

Romayne looked at her anxiously. “Let me get you a glass of wine,” he said.

She consented — she really felt the need of it. As he turned away to ring the bell, she put the question which had been in her mind from the moment when she had seen Winterfield.

“How did you become acquainted with this gentleman?”

“Through Father Benwell.”

She was not surprised by the answer — her suspicion of the priest had remained in her mind from the night of Lady Loring’s ball. The future of her married life depended on her capacity to check the growing intimacy between the two men. In that conviction she found the courage to face Winterfield.

How should she meet him? The impulse of the moment pointed to the shortest way out of the dreadful position in which she was placed — it was to treat him like a stranger. She drank her glass of w............