The man winked at her in the dusk; she winked back, and put her hand intimately on his shoulder.  She thought, “I am safe with him now in the house.”  The feeling of solitude with him, of being barricaded against the world and at the mercy of Louis alone, was exquisite to her.  Then Louis raised himself on his toes, and raised his left arm with the nail as high as he could, and stuck the point of the nail against a pencil-mark on the wall.  Then he raised the right hand with the hammer; but the mark was just too high to be efficiently reached by both hands simultaneously.  Louis might have stood on a chair.  This simple device, however, was too simple for them.

Rachel said—­

“Shall I stand on a chair and hold the nail for you?” Louis murmured—­

“Brainy little thing!  Never at a loss!”

She skipped on to a chair and held the nail.  Towering thus above him, she looked down on her husband and thought:  “This man is mine alone, and he is all mine.”  And in Rachel’s fancy the thought itself seemed to caress Louis from head to foot.

“Supposing I catch you one?” said Louis, as he prepared to strike.

“I don’t care,” said Rachel.

And the fact was that really she would have liked him to hit her finger instead of the nail—­not too hard, but still smartly.  She would have taken pleasure in the pain:  such was the perversity of the young wife.  But Louis hit the nail infallibly every time.

He took up a picture which had been lying against the wall in a dark corner, and thrust the twisting wire of it over the nail.

Rachel, when in the deepening darkness she had peered into the frame, exclaimed, pouting—­

“Oh, darling, you aren’t going to hang that here, are you?  It’s so old-fashioned.  You said it was old-fashioned yourself.  I did want that thing that came this morning to be put somewhere here.  Why can’t you stick this in the spare room?...  Unless, of course, you prefer....”  She was being deferential to the art-expert in him, as well as to the husband.

“Not in the least!” said Louis, acquiescent, and unhooked the picture.

Taste changes.  The rejected of Rachel was a water-colour by the late Athelstan Maldon, adored by Mrs. Maldon.  Already it had been degraded from the parlour to the bedroom, and now it was to be pushed away like a shame into obscurity.  It was a view of the celebrated Vale of Llangollen, finicking, tight, and hard in manner, but with a certain sentiment and modest skill.  The way in which the initials “A.M.” had been hidden amid the foreground foliage in the left-hand corner disclosed enough of the painter’s quiet and proud temperament to show that he “took after” his mother.  Yet a few more years, and the careless observer would miss those initials altogether and would be contemptuously inquiring, “Who did this old daub, I wonder?” And nobody would know who did the old daub, or that the old daub for thirty years had been an altar for undying affection, and also a distinguished specimen—­admired by a whole generation of townsfolk—­of the art of water-colour.