Time went heavily for him away from Joan. He roamed listlessly here and
there and watched the weather-glass uneasily; for this abstention from work
was a deliberate challenge to Providence to change sunshine for rain and
high temperature for low. Upon the third day therefore he returned at early
morning to his picture in the shed. The greater part was finished, and the
masses of gorse stood out strong, solid and complete with the slender brown
figure before them. The face of it was very sweet, but to Barron it seemed
as the face of a ghost, with no hot blood in its veins, no live interests
in its eyes.
"'Tis the countenance of a nun," he said sneeringly to himself. "No fire,
no love, no story--a sweet virgin page of life, innocent of history or of
interest as a new-blown lily." The problem was difficult, and he had now
quite convinced himself that solution depended on one course alone. "And
why not?" he asked himself. "Why, when pleasures are offered, shall I
refuse them? God knows Nature is chary enough with her delights. She has
sowed death in me, here in my lungs. I shall bleed away my life some day or
die strangled, unless I anticipate the climax and choose another exit. Why
not take what she throws to me in the meantime?"
He walked down to the Point, set up his easel and waited, feeling that Joan
had certainly made two pilgrimages since his last visit and little doubting
that she would come a third time.
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