she felt she was his debtor.  The thought of seeing him again, dismissed at first, struggled against later on, at last became an all-absorbing craving.  Each evening the temptation to go and see him came strong upon her in the solitude of her own room.  She experienced an uncomfortable irritating feeling, a vague desire which she could not define, and only calmed down somewhat on ascribing this troubled state of mind to a wish to evince her gratitude.  She was so utterly alone, she felt so stifled in that sleepy abode, the exuberance of youth seethed so strongly within her, her heart craved so desperately for friendship!

‘So I took advantage of my first day out,’ she continued.  ’And besides, the weather was so nice this morning after all the dull rain.’

Claude, feeling very happy and standing before her, also confessed himself, but he had nothing to hide.

‘For my part,’ said he, ’I dared not think of you any more.  You are like one of the fairies of the story-books, who spring from the floor and disappear into the walls at the very moment one least expects it; aren’t you now?  I said to myself, “It’s all over:  it was perhaps only in my fancy that I saw her come to this studio.”  Yet here you are.  Well, I am pleased at it, very pleased indeed.’

Smiling, but embarrassed, Christine averted her head, pretending to look around her.  But her smile soon died away.  The ferocious-looking paintings which she again beheld, the glaring sketches of the South, the terrible anatomical accuracy of the studies from the nude, all chilled her as on the first occasion.  She became really afraid again, and she said gravely, in an altered voice: 

‘I am disturbing you; I am going.’

‘Oh! not at all, not at all,’ exclaimed Claude, preventing her from rising.  ’It does me good to have a talk with you, for I was working myself to death.  Oh! that confounded picture; it’s killing me as it is.’

Thereupon Christine, lifting her eyes, looked at the large picture, the canvas that had been turned to the wall on the previous occasion, and which she had vainly wished to see.

The background—­the dark glade pierced by a flood of sunlight—­was still only broadly brushed in.  But the two little wrestlers—­the fair one and the dark—­almost finished by now, showed clearly in the light.  In the foreground, the gentleman in the velveteen jacket, three times begun afresh, had now been left in distress.  The painter was more particularly working at the principal figure, the woman lying on the grass.  He had not touched the head again.  He was battling with the body, changing his model every week, so despondent at being unable to satisfy himself that for a couple of days he had been trying to improve the figure from imagination, without recourse to nature, although he boasted that he never invented.