Owen’s credit to recognise always.  One morning in the studio Evelyn had happened to sit on the edge of a chair; the painter had once seen her in the same attitude by the side of her accompanist, and he had told her not to move, and had gone for her grey shawl and placed it upon her shoulders.  A friend of Owen’s declared the portrait to be that of a housekeeper on account of the shawl—­a strange article of dress, difficult to associate with a romantic singer.  All the same, Evelyn was very probable in this picture; her past and her future were in this disconcerting compound of the commonplace and the rare; and the confusion which this picture created in the minds of Owen’s friends was aggravated by the strange elliptical execution.  Owen admitted the drawing to be not altogether grammatical; one eye was a little lower than the other, but the eyes were beautifully drawn—­the right eye, for instance, and without the help of any shadow.

“Look at the face,” he said to Harding, “achieved with shadow and light, the light faintly graduated with a delicate shade of rose.”

He compared the face to a jewel the most beautiful in the world, and the background to eighteenth-century watered silk.

“The painter conjures,” Harding said, “and she rises out of that grey background.”

“Quite so, Harding.”

Owen sat, his eyes fixed on the picture, his thoughts far away, thinking that it would be better, perhaps, if he never saw her again.  Not to see her again!  The words sounded very gloomy; for he was thinking of his ancestors at Riversdale, in their tomb, and himself going down to join them.

“I think, Asher, it is getting late; I must go now.”

The friends bade each other good-night among the footmen who closed the front door.

In his great, lonely bedroom, full of tall mahogany furniture, Owen lay down; and he asked himself how it was that he had left America without seeing her.  His journey to America was one of the uncanniest things that had ever happened in his life.  Something seemed to have kept him from her, and it was impossible for him to determine what that thing was, whether some sudden weakening of the will in himself or some spiritual agency.  But to believe in the transference of human thought, and that the nuns could influence his action at three thousand miles distance, seemed as if he were dropping into some base superstition.  Between sleeping and waking a thought emerged which kept him awake till morning:  “Why had Evelyn returned to the stage?” When he saw her last at Thornton Grange her retirement seemed to be definitely fixed.  Nothing he could say had been able to move her.  She was going to retire from the stage....  But she had not done so.  Now, who had persuaded her?  Was it Ulick Dean?  Were these two in America together?  The thought of Evelyn in New York with Ulick Dean, going to the theatre with her, Ulick sitting in the stalls, listening, just as he, Owen, had listened to her, became unendurable; he must have news of her; only from her father could he get reliable news.  So he went to Dulwich, uncertain if he should send in his card begging for an interview, or if he should just push past the servant into the music-room, always supposing Innes were at home.