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The third day after Lyon’s return to London was a Sunday, so that he could go and ask Mrs. Capadose for luncheon. She had given him in the spring a general invitation to do so and he had availed himself of it several times. These had been the occasions (before he sat to him) when he saw the Colonel most familiarly. Directly after the meal his host disappeared (he went out, as he said, to call on his women) and the second half-hour was the best, even when there were other people. Now, in the first days of December, Lyon had the luck to find the pair alone, without even Amy, who appeared but little in public. They were in the drawing-room, waiting for the repast to be announced, and as soon as he came in the Colonel broke out, ‘My dear fellow, I’m delighted to see you! I’m so keen to begin again.’

‘Oh, do go on, it’s so beautiful,’ Mrs. Capadose said, as she gave him her hand.

Lyon looked from one to the other; he didn’t know what he had expected, but he had not expected this. ‘Ah, then, you think I’ve got something?’

‘You’ve got everything,’ said Mrs. Capadose, smiling from her golden-brown eyes.

‘She wrote you of our little crime?’ her husband asked. ‘She dragged me there–I had to go.’ Lyon wondered for a moment whether he meant by their little crime the assault on the canvas; but the Colonel’s next words didn’t confirm this interpretation. ‘You know I like to sit–it gives such a chance to my bavardise. And just now I have time.’

‘You must remember I had almost finished,’ Lyon remarked.

‘So you had. More’s the pity. I should like you to begin again.’

‘My dear fellow, I shall have to begin again!’ said Oliver Lyon with a laugh, looking at Mrs. Capadose. She did not meet his eyes–she had got up to ring for luncheon. ‘The picture has been smashed,’ Lyon continued.

‘Smashed? Ah, what did you do that for?’ Mrs. Capadose asked, standing there before him in all her clear, rich beauty. Now that she looked at him she was impenetrable.

‘I didn’t–I found it so–with a dozen holes punched in it!’

‘I say!’ cried the Colonel.

Lyon turned his eyes to him, smiling. ‘I hope you didn’t do it?’

‘Is it ruined?’ the Colonel inquired. He was as brightly true as his wife and he looked simply as if Lyon’s question could not be serious. ‘For the love of sitting to you? My dear fellow, if I had thought of it I would!’

‘Nor you either?’ the painter demanded of Mrs. Capadose.

Before she had time to reply her husband had seized her arm, as if a highly suggestive idea had come to him. ‘I say, my dear, that woman–that woman!’

‘That woman?’ Mrs. Capadose repeated; and Lyon too wondered what woman he meant.

‘Don’t you remember when we came out, she was at the door–or a little way from it? I spoke to you of her–I told you about her. Geraldine–Grenadine–the one who burst in that day,’ he explained to Lyon. ‘We saw her hanging about–I called Everina’s attention to her.’

‘Do you mean she got at my picture?’

‘Ah yes, I remember,’ said Mrs. Capadose, with a sigh.

‘She burst in again–she had learned the way–she was waiting for her chance,’ the Colonel continued. ‘Ah, the little brute!’

Lyon looked down; he felt himself colouring. This was what he had been waiting for–the day the Colonel should wantonly sacrifice some innocent person. And could his wife be a party to that final atrocity? Lyon had reminded himself repeatedly during the previous weeks that when the Colonel perpetrated his misdeed she had already quitted the room; but he had argued none the less–it was a virtual certainty–that he had on rejoining her immediately made his achievement plain to her. He was in the flush of performance; and even if he had not mentioned what he had done she would have guessed it. He did not for an instant believe that poor Miss Geraldine had been hovering about his door, nor had the account given by the Colonel the summer before of his relations with this lady deceived him in the slightest degree. Lyon had never seen her before the day she planted herself in his studio; but he knew her and classified her as if he had made her. He was acquainted with the London female model in all her varieties–in every phase of her development and every step of her decay. When he entered his house that September morning just after the arrival of his two friends there had been no symptoms whatever, up and down the road, of Miss Geraldine’s reappearance. That fact had been fixed in his mind by his recollecting the vacancy of the prospect when his cook told him that a lady and a gentleman were in his studio: he had wondered there was not a carriage nor a cab at his door. Then he had reflected that they would have come by the underground railway; he was close to the Marlborough Road station and he knew the Colonel, coming to his sittings, more than once had availed himself of that convenience. ‘How in the world did she get in?’ He addressed the question to his companions indifferently.