"Or? . . . The other alternative?" murmured Rooke. Roger laughed roughly, fingering something he held concealed in his hand.

"You'll know that later," he said grimly. "I advise you to close with the five hundred."

Rooke shook his head.

"Sorry it's impossible. I prefer to keep the picture."

"Oh, Maryon, give in to him! Do give in to him!"

The words came sobbingly from Nan's white lips, and Rooke turned to her instantly.

"Have I your permission to keep the picture, Nan?" he asked, fixing her with his queer, magnetic eyes.

An oath broke from Roger.

"You'll have the original, you see, Trenby," explained Rooke urbanely, glancing towards him.

Then he turned again to Nan.

"Have I, Nan?"

She opened her lips to reply, but no words came. She stood there silently, her eyes wide and terror-stricken, her cheeks stained with the tears that dripped down them unheeded.

Roger's glance swept her as though there were something distasteful to him in the sight of her and she flinched under it, moaning a little.

"Well," he said to Rooke. "Is the picture mine--or yours?"

"Mine," answered Rooke.

Roger made a single stride towards the easel. Then his hand shot out, and the next moment there was a grinding sound of ripping and tearing as, with the big blade of his clasp-knife, he slashed and rent and hacked at the picture until it was a wreck of split and riven canvas.

With a cry like that of a wounded animal Rooke leaped forward to gave it, but Roger hurled him aside as though he were a child, and once more the knife bit its way remorselessly through paint and canvas.

There was something indescribably horrible in this deliberate, merciless destruction of the exquisite work of art. Nan, watching the keen blade sweep again and again across the painted figure of the portrait, felt as though the blows were being rained upon her actual body. Distraught with the violence and horror of the scene she tried to scream, but her voice failed her, and with a hoa.r.s.e, half-strangled cry she covered her eyes, rocking to and fro. But the raucous sound of rending canvas still grated hideously against her ears.

Suddenly Roger ceased to cut and slash at the portrait. Seizing it in both hands, he dragged it from the easel and flung it on the floor at Rooke's feet.

"There's your picture!" he said. "Take it--and hang it in your 'admirable light'!" And he strode out of the room.

A long silence fell between the two who were left. Then Rooke, who was staring at the ruin of his work with his mouth twisted, into an odd, cynical smile, murmured beneath his breath:

"_Sic transit_ . . ."

Once more the silence wrapped them round. Wan-faced and with staring eyes, Nan drew near the heap of mangled canvas.

At last:

"I can't bear it! I can't bear it!" she whispered, and a shuddering sob shook her slight frame from head to foot. "Oh, Maryon--"

She stretched her hands towards him gropingly, like a child that is frightened in the dark.

. . . Half an hour later found them still together, standing with linked hands. In Rooke's eyes there was a quiet light of triumph, while Nan's att.i.tude betrayed a kind of hesitancy, as of one driven along strange and unknown ways.

"Then you'll come, Nan, you'll come?" he said eagerly.

"I'll come," she answered dully. "I can't bear my life any longer."

"I'll make you happy. . . . I swear it!"

"Will you, Maryon?" She shook her head and the eyes she raised to his were full of a dumb, hopeless misery. "I don't think anything could ever make me--happy. But I'd have gone on . . . I'd have borne it . . . if Uncle David were still here. What we are going to do would have hurt him so"--and her voice trembled. "But he's gone, and now nothing seems to matter very much."

A sudden overwhelming tenderness for this pain-racked, desolate spirit surged up in Maryon's heart.

"You poor little child!" he murmured. "You poor child!"

And gathering her into his arms he held her closely, leaning his cheek against her hair, with no pa.s.sion, but with a swift, understanding sympathy that sprang from the best that was in the man.

She clung to him forlornly, so tired and hopeless she no longer felt any impulse to resist him. She had tried--tried to withstand him and to go on treading the uphill path that lay before her. But now she had come to the end of her strength. She would go away with Maryon . . .

go out of it all . . . and somewhere, perhaps, together they would build up a new and happier life.

Dimly at the back of her mind floated the memory of Peter's words:

"But there's honour, dear, and duty . . ."

She crushed down the remembrance resolutely. If she were going away into a new world with Maryon, the door of memory must be closed fast.

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE GREEN CAR

The atmosphere still held the chill of early morning as Sandy emerged, vigorous and glowing and amazingly hungry, from his daily swim in the sea. He dressed quickly in a small tent erected on the sh.o.r.e and then, whistling cheerfully and with his towel slung over his shoulders, took his way up the beach to where his bicycle stood propped against a boulder.

A few minutes' pedalling brought him into St. Wennys, where he dismounted to buy a packet of "gaspers" dispensed by the village postmistress.

It was a quaint little village, typical of the West Country, with its double row of small houses climbing the side of a steep hill capped at the summit by an ancient church of weather-beaten stone. The bright June sunshine winked against the panes, of the cottage windows and flickered down upon the k.n.o.bby surface of the cobbled pavements, while in the dust of the wide road an indiscriminate group of children and dogs played joyously together.

The warning hoot of a motor-horn sent them scuttling to the side of the road, and, as Sandy smilingly watched the grubby little crowd's hasty flight for safety, a big green car shot by and was swiftly lost to sight in a cloud of whirling dust.

But not before Sandy's keen eyes had noted its occupants.

"Nan and the artist fellow!" he muttered.

Then, remembering that Nan had promised to go with him that afternoon for a run in the "stink-pot," he stepped out into the middle of the street and stood staring up the broad white road along which the car had disappeared--the great road which led to London.