The next morning, after writing her letters and attending to her household duties, Clytie went into her studio with the praiseworthy intention of stimulating the artistic impulse that had been flagging for so long. Kent was right, she thought. Her life could be reconstructed. She would begin her laborious art life again, resume it seriously as a profession, put her pictures into the market once more. Amid the many confusing thoughts and emotions resulting from her conversation with Kent, one idea had sprung in connection with Jack. She could not adopt the boy. That was a wild feminine craving, somewhat selfish, springing out of a bitter hour when fairer hopes were crushed. It cost her a sigh to resign; but she trusted to Kent's judgment, and her mind was so far at rest. Yet if it could lie in her power to help Jack materially in after years, when a little capital would be worth all the world to him, she felt that she would have wrought some good for one human creature at least in her somewhat self-centred life. And then Kent's advice as to her art mingled and combined with these thoughts, and the outcome was the sudden idea that the proceeds of the sale of her pictures would, in course of time, form a very considerable fund. She clapped her hands with delight when this occurred to her. A mountain of weariness seemed removed. In the spontaneity of new workings she scribbled a hasty line to Kent and had it posted with the address scarcely dry.

“I am going to paint seriously, and sell my pictures, and devote the proceeds to a fund for Jack. Shall I?”

She was in bright spirits this morning, having discovered an object in life. The future has generally much more to do with our present moods than the past. Yet, notwithstanding this broad truth, the immediate past had a certain influence on Clytie's humour. Whilst she was driving home the afternoon before, the gravity of the fact of her confession to Kent had somewhat weighed upon her. She had spent the lonely evening grappling with a truth that had been taking half-reluctant shape in her consciousness for the last two months, and now rose clear and sharply defined. She had even written to Kent the following portion of a letter which she straightway tore up into the finest of pieces. In fact her intention of sending it to him was from the first of the very remotest. “My dear Kent,” ran this singularly feminine effusion. “My words to-day were true. If you had told me you loved me eighteen months ago, I should have realised myself and what it was that I felt towards you. The knowledge of her own heart does not come to a woman with the easy grace that your sentimentalists make out. It is somewhat of a fierce process, Kent. There is no royal road to it. Well, I know my own heart now, and I have bought the knowledge with agonies of suffering. Oh, Kent, my true, loyal Kent! I am tired, tired of hiding facts from myself, of acting in a wilful dream, in defiance of the promptings of my reason. I am a woman, and I ought not to confess things to myself, let alone to you. So people say—and people are so wise, aren't they? I love you, Kent. There, I write it down in black and white. It looks odd, grotesque, horrible, and yet wonderfully comforting. I love you, Kent. Why should I deceive myself any longer? God knows whether it is for my happiness in the future or my misery; but now that the beauty of it is upon me it makes me wonderfully happy. Yes, wonderfully, wonderfully, wonderfully happy.”

And then she threw down her pen and shredded the paper with frenzied zeal. But her heart was lighter. The world seemed a clearer, pleasanter place. Her cheeks burned like fire at the thought of Kent ever knowing of this feeling. She arranged in her mind the tenderest and most elusive of relations between Kent and herself. He, a declared lover, should give her all the comfort and kind counsel of a friend; she, his declared friend, would find delicate, subtle ways of colouring and softening his life with her love. A new paradise of exquisite emotion opened its evanescent portals. For the first time in her life came the romance of delicate sentiment, tinged with an innocent pink like the buds in spring. It is true these same buds, to continue the analogy, burst into gorgeous, riotous bloom under the summer sun; but while the tenderer air of spring keeps them closed they have a grace peculiarly their own.

Clytie moved about the studio singing, a sign with her of great content. The window was open and the morning sun streamed in, filling the large and somewhat heavily tapestried room with gay light. It glorified Clytie as she passed across the patch of sunlight, falling upon her hair in a thousand scintillations and revealing the deep sea-blue of her eyes. She wore a soft cream morning gown, a golden tasselled girdle round her waist, an edging of old lace round the somewhat open neck. The wide, drooping sleeves she had caught up a little for convenience in working, and her arms were bare to the elbow. The skirt clung around her as she walked quickly about the room, with her old elastic tread, making a soft frou-frou that pleased her, she did not know why. She was happy again, filled with a double sense of the meaning of life. At last she sat down before a small easel, on which was put the board with its fair sheet of Whatman paper ready for the first sketch. In her rapid, eager way she commenced to indicate the motive of the picture that had flashed like an inspiration upon her. In the middle distance on the left a pair of lovers, the woman looking with upturned face at the man, whose arm was round her waist. In the foreground, peeping at them from behind a clump of bushes, a girl of about seventeen, with a letter in her hand. The contrast between the two female faces was the motive—the fulfilment of knowledge on the one, the dawning revelation on the other. The title had come with the conception: “Maiden and Woman.” Clytie worked on steadily with her Ébauche, keen, sure of herself, tingling once again with the excitement of inspiration. She knew she could put that in their faces which would raise the picture above the narrative prettiness of Sant and his school. The accessories were to be severe to austerity. No elaborate detail in tree painting, no subtle effects of light and shade. The principle of abstraction to be as uncompromisingly carried out as in one of Seymour Haden's etchings. The whole artistic force of the picture was to be concentrated in the awakened and awakening souls.

She was absorbed in her work when, after a tap at the door, Jack came in. Clytie looked up with a smile.

“You here again, Jack! That is good of you. But I can't say a word to you—positively. I am so busy. Sit down somewhere until I have finished.”

The boy, used to these fits of absorption in his two artist patronesses, sat down for a little and let his eyes wander round the studio, looking at the pictures and nicknacks. Then he got up to make a closer examination of vases and photographs, and walked about on tiptoe, trying to still the noise of his iron-shod boots against the hard, polished floor. At last he discovered on the bookshelves an illustrated History of England, with which he retired to his favourite place on the hearthrug. And so they remained for half an hour without saying a word—Clytie bending over her study, Jack curled up with his picture-book. It was quite still. A stray bumble-bee looked in now and then at the window, buzzing querulously, as if he had lost his way in London, and then darted off again. From the servants' hall came the just perceptible voice of one of the maids singing a hymn-tune, and from far, far away came the tinkling treble of a piano-organ. And these few sounds, so faint yet so clear, accentuated the summer stillness.

When Clytie had put the last few touches on the portion of her work that demanded all her concentration, she gave a little sigh of relief.

“What do you think of that, Jack?” she said, leaning back with her head critically aslant. “Don't you think that is going to make a famous picture?”

Jack jumped up promptly, leaving his book open on the hearthrug, and came up to her side. He was not a connoisseur, in spite of his associations with art, so he said nothing, but grinned appreciatively, rubbing the calf of one leg with the instep of the other.

“Well,” asked Clytie, “why don't you admire?”

“You aint given them no faces,” said Jack.

“Ah! This is to be one face,” she said, pointing to a kind of remarque at the foot of the sheet. “Or something like it. Now just use your imagination, Jack. This face is to go there—the woman whose whole nature has been awakened, and is shining out of her eyes, and quivering on her lips, and is vibrating all through her frame—all of which is Greek and Chaldee to you, my good Jack; but I may as well explain. And now I have got to fix a face for this one. What kind of face do you think I am going to give her?”

“I dunno,” murmured Jack. And then after a slight pause: “And what's the man going to be like?”

“Ah!” said Clytie with a mock sigh. “What a little Philistine you are! The man can be any kind of creature on two legs. What does it matter about the man? He is a nuisance. I have a good mind to make him awfully ugly with a face like a rhinoceros. See, like this.”

She made a few rapid strokes with her charcoal in the oval left for the man's face, and the result was a picturesque monster with a long nose, Mephistophelian eyebrows, and a moustache curling up to his ears. Then they both burst out laughing.

“Let me draw some funny men for you,” she said in the light-hearted buoyancy of her mood. “Run and get me that sheet of paper over there.”

She pinned the sheet that Jack brought her on to the board and began to draw caricatures.

“You shall choose one for me to put in the picture, Jack.”

It was a long, long time since she had indulged this freakish side of her genius. It ran riot now in grotesque exuberance. Here a head with wide, leering mouth and pointed ears, like the devil that looks over Lincoln; there a snouted monster with cat's whiskers, an eyeglass, and a silk hat; a lean, cadaverous, equine face with a terrible squint; a masher, indicated by three or four little dots and lines. Jack looked on in rapture. She had never drawn pictures for him before. He broke out now and then into breathless exclamations.

“Lord, he's an ugly one! Give him a long nose—longer than that; and, my eye! that's a wart upon it. One of the teachers at school has a wart on his nose. That's just like him! And where's this one's 'ed?—he's all body and legs!”

And then he jumped and clapped his hands when the head was seen to emerge from between the knees after the fashion of the boneless wonders.

When she had filled up the last space on the sheet she tossed the charcoal into the tray, and rose from her seat.

“There, Jack! There's nothing like going absolutely mad on occasions. Now if you'd like to keep these pictures and show them to the boys at school, you can.”

She rolled up the stiff piece of drawing paper, slipped an elastic band round it in her hasty way, and gave it to Jack, who could only look his delighted thanks.

“Now I must go and wash my hands and get decent for lunch. Go downstairs and tell Mrs. Pawkins to give you something to eat. Stay—you had better leave that roll up here; come in for it before you go.”

She took it from him, and laid it on a little table near the door. She did not desire that the inquisitive eyes in the servants' hall should witness the mistress's frivolity. Jack understood her more or less, but Mrs. Pawkins and Mary and John would have questioned her sanity.

Jack lingered for a moment on the threshold, and then drew shyly from his handkerchief pocket a dingy, whitey-brown packet.

“I came to show you this,” he said, putting it into her hand. “I prigged it from mother's drawer this morning. You'll give it me back, won't you?”

“I have a good mind not to,” said Clytie severely. “If your mother knew, she would be very angry, and you would catch it. Still, as you have been a good boy, I'll look at it and give it you back. Run away, now.”

Jack did as he was bid, and Clytie, after a few turns about the room, putting things more or less straight, unfolded the dirty wrapper of Jack's packet, with an amused curiosity as to the features of Jack's father.

But in another second all her curiosity, amusement, idle interest, were fled, and her whole emotive force concentrated into a short, irrepressible gasp of astonishment. It was a photograph of Thornton, her husband. There was no mistaking it. She had the fellow to it in her album. One day long ago she had seen it among his odds and ends, and had begged for it, loving it for all that it was so many years old, taken when he was still in the army. He looked so stalwart, soldierly, magnificent in his uniform. It was perhaps the likeness of him that she had cherished most—only too familiar. For a moment she could hardly understand—the shock was so sudden and unexpected. Then with the quick reaction she realised what it meant. Thornton was Jack's father, Mrs. Burmester was his mother. With a shudder of disgust she threw the photograph on the table.

The riddle of Jack's parentage was solved in a way she had not looked for; the mystery that had lain hidden in strange, unknown depths of passion was now clear to her in all its unlovely nakedness. Her soul sickened at the truth. She had not come to her husband with the helpless ignorance of a young girl. The knowledge of good and evil, to employ the somewhat meaningless euphemism, had come to her through her intelligence by means of books, through her contact with real life. She had grasped the fact of the existence of the Loulou MendÈs type with whom love is a trade. That a man should have had a liaison with such a woman she could have understood. In fact she never at any one moment had fancied that Thornton had brought to her the pure ardour of a virgin soul. To have been revolted at the discovery of a mere antenuptial infidelity on the part of her husband would have been to her impossible. It was not noble, it is true; but it was intelligible. There was certainly for a lower nature a charm, witchery, fascination, in the fleshly beauty of the courtesan. She had heard of many men falling victims to it, and sinking very little into degradation. If Jack's mother had been such a woman, she would have felt little more than the shock of coincidence, a sense of strangeness in her relations with the boy. But Jack's mother was not of this type. She never had charm, witchery, or fascination. She had never even passable good looks. A poor, stolid, dull, animal drudge.

The truth had come upon Clytie; the truth that had touched her now and then with its bat wings, making her shiver; the horrible, soul-nauseating truth of the eternal beast in man. She knew Thornton now as he was, and her indifference passed into loathing. In Thornton's feelings what difference had there been between this boy's mother and herself?

She walked swiftly up and down the studio, with clenched white hands, her shoulders rising now and then in an involuntary heave of disgust. The glory had gone out of the day. A foul shadow overspread it.

Suddenly Thornton himself appeared with eager face, a telegram in his hand. He had just come in from riding in the Park, and according to the modern fashion out of the season, was dressed in tweed suit and gaiters. He carried a silver-headed riding whip jauntily under his arm. He waved the telegram exultingly.

“They have asked me to put up for Witherby!” he said. “I'll have some lunch on the strength of it. I suppose there's some going.”

“I believe lunch is at the usual hour,” said Clytie, not looking at him.

He lingered a little, flicking his legs with his whip.

“You might as well congratulate me, if only for the sake of politeness,” he said in an injured tone.

“Oh, yes; I congratulate you,” she replied.

Her voice sounded strange in her own ears. She felt an almost irresistible impulse to burst forth into a torrent of speech, to say out finally all the bitterness and loathing that were in her heart. She restrained herself, but the effort gave a queer guttural resonance to her words. She turned and looked out of the window.

“What the devil's the matter?” he asked impatiently. “I came in, 'pon my soul, thinking you'd be pleased. It's a safe seat. I'm dead certain to knock the confounded Radical into a cocked hat. Just the moment when I've got what I've been sweating for the last eighteen months, confound it all, I did think you'd be civil for once in a way. But it's just like you; I might have expected it. Well, perhaps it's the truth to say you don't care a damn one way or the other.”

He walked to and fro for a little, fuming. Then his eyes falling on the photograph that lay on the table, he picked it up, as an angry man will do, looked at it absently for a moment, and pitched it sharply to the other side of the room. Clytie, startled by the slight click of the cardboard striking against the wall, turned half round and met his eyes fixed loweringly upon her. Each held the other spellbound for a few seconds. Then the door opened and Jack came into the studio, checking his motion forward as he saw Thornton.

“What the deuce is this?” cried the latter.

With a swift, instinctive glance Clytie compared the two faces. They were astonishingly alike. The same finely moulded features, dark lucent eyes, brown crisp hair, white evenly set teeth; the same lines of cruelty at the corners of the lips. Strange that, much as she had studied Jack's physiognomy, the likeness had never suggested itself. At Thornton's petulant question the boy looked at him half frightened, and then at Clytie, and was about to shrink back. But she called him in.

“Don't go away without your drawing, Jack. This,” she said coldly to Thornton, “is a protÉgÉ of mine. He was once my model—for my picture 'Jack.' Here, Jack, take your drawing. Run home. Thank you for coming to see me.”

“And—and the photograph. You said you'd give it me back.”

Clytie went to the table where she had thrown it. Not seeing it, she remembered the sound that had startled her, and turning round, perceived the photograph lying face upwards on the floor. She gave a little start of dismay. The situation threatened to become dramatic, and she was unprepared. In her hurry to dismiss the boy she had forgotten the photograph. Now he had called attention to it, and she felt bound to restore it to him to save the poor little urchin's honour and most probably his back. And Thornton was leaning against the mantelpiece, with his hands in his pockets, frowningly surveying the scene. With outward calm, but with a beating heart, she picked up the photograph, wrapped it in the dirty covering, and put it into Jack's hand. Thornton, who had watched her movements with gathering surprise, strode forward with an oath.

“What the devil——”

But Clytie quickly interposed herself between him and the boy.

“Run away!” she said in a hasty whisper, and Jack, accustomed from his childhood to sudden dartings, disappeared like a flash. Clytie put her back against the door and looked at her husband with strange eyes. It had been done with the speed of a conjuring trick.

“What on earth is the meaning of all this?” asked Thornton; “and what are you giving away my photographs for? Upon my soul, I think you are taking leave of your senses. You'll have to drop this sort of thing. I'm damned if I am going to have my photographs given away to all the street urchins in London. Play the fool yourself if you like, but I'll trouble you to keep me and my things out of it. Have you been giving me away any more?”

“Oh, God! Thornton, you have given yourself away!” she cried, echoing his slang phrase half unconsciously in her bitterness. “I'll tell you, if you like. The photograph belongs to the boy's mother. He is your child.”

“What!” cried Thornton in a voice of thunder, showing his teeth savagely.

“Yes, your child,” she went on, striving to be calm. “His mother's name is Burmester. You gave her the picture yourself years ago. I had just made the discovery when you came in. Ah—h!” she cried, putting her hands suddenly before her face, “it is horrible, horrible!”

“Ha!” retorted Thornton fiercely. “You are in one of your damned high-horse moods. Well, I did give one of my father's kitchen-maids a photograph, and she did have a child, and I paid her for her trouble, and, damme! what that's got to do with you now is more than I can see. Besides, you never were such a fool as to imagine you were marrying an infernal saint.”

“Oh, stop! stop!” she cried. “Don't say anything more. You will brutalise me as well as yourself. I never thought you a saint—even when I cared for you. I know what you are, and, oh, God! this is the end of it. If you had betrayed a sweet, innocent girl, you would have been a villain, but not necessarily a brute—someone charming, pretty, attractive—I could have understood it; but a poor stupid drudge—a kitchen-maid—little better than an animal——”

Thornton rushed forward and caught her by her shoulder.

“By the Lord God! if you don't hold your tongue, I'll strike you!”

She saw that she had aroused the devil in him. She had meant to be calm, to tell him plainly the facts of the case and to say that it would be better that they should live apart. But an irrepressible shudder had come over her, and then the brutal cynicism of his confession had caused her the loss of her self-control. As she saw the blazing eyes and white glittering teeth in front of her and felt the grip on her shoulder, she regretted that she had been, in a way, to blame; but she was no coward, and the threat awakened the fierce old Puritan courage in her nature. She did not flinch, but looked him directly in the face.

“Your striking me would only add to your other brutalities.”

“Damn you!” he cried in blind fury; and swinging her round, he struck her with the riding whip with all his huge strength, cutting the back of the thin morning gown, that flew open at the gap, showing her bare shoulders. Then he hurled her from him and rushed out of the room.

With an almost superhuman effort of will Clytie sprang to her feet, stood for a moment dazed, stunned, on fire with agony, then staggered forward and threw herself upon the bearskin rug, with the illustrated History of England, open as Jack had left it, beneath her face.