And now Edward Henry beheld the objective of his pilgrimage, her whose personality, portrait and adventures had been filling the newspapers of two hemispheres for three weeks past.  She was not realistically like her portraits.  She was a little, thin, pale, obviously nervous woman, of any age from thirty-five to fifty, with fair untidy hair, and pale grey-blue eyes that showed the dreamer, the idealist and the harsh fanatic.  She looked as though a moderate breeze would have overthrown her, but she also looked, to the enlightened observer, as though she would recoil before no cruelty and no suffering in pursuit of her vision.  The blind dreaming force behind her apparent frailty would strike terror into the heart of any man intelligent enough to understand it.  Edward Henry had an inward shudder.  “Great Scott!” he reflected.  “I shouldn’t like to be ill and have Isabel for a nurse!”

And his mind at once flew to Nellie, and then to Elsie April.  “And so she’s going to marry Wrissell!” he reflected, and could scarcely believe it.

Then he violently wrenched his mind back to the immediate objective.  He wondered why Isabel Joy should wear a bowler hat and a mustard-coloured jacket that resembled a sporting man’s overcoat; and why these garments suited her.  With a whip in her hand she could have sat for a jockey.  And yet she was a woman, and very feminine, and probably old enough to be Elsie April’s mother!  A disconcerting world, he thought.

The “man’s photographer,” as he was described in copper on Fifth Avenue and in gold on his own doors, was a big, loosely-articulated male, who loured over the trifle Isabel like a cloud over a sheep in a great field.  Edward Henry could only see his broad bending back as he posed in athletic attitudes behind the camera.

Suddenly Rentoul Smiles dashed to a switch, and Isabel’s wistful face was transformed into that of a drowned corpse, into a dreadful harmony of greens and purples.

“Now,” said Rentoul Smiles, in a deep voice that was like a rich unguent, “we’ll try again.  We’ll just play around that spot.  Look into my eyes.  Not at my eyes, my dear woman, into them!  Just a little more challenge—­a little more!  That’s it.  Don’t wink, for the land’s sake!  Now.”

He seized a bulb at the end of a tube and slowly squeezed—­squeezed it tragically and remorselessly, twisting himself as if suffering in sympathy with the bulb, and then in a wide, sweeping gesture he flung the bulb on to the top of the camera and ejaculated: 

“Ha!”

Edward Henry thought: 

“I would give ten pounds to see Rentoul Smiles photograph Sir John Pilgrim.”  But the next instant the forgotten sensation of hurry was upon him once more.  Quick, quick, Rentoul Smiles!  Edward Henry’s scorching desire was to get done and leave New York.