CHAPTER XIX.
BIANCA In her studio that afternoon Blanca stood before her picture of the little model--the figure with parted pale-red lips and haunting, pale-blue eyes, gazing out of shadow into lamplight.
She was frowning, as though resentful of a piece of work which had the power to kill her other pictures.

What force had moved her to paint like that?
What had she felt while the girl was standing before her, still as some pale flower placed in a cup of water?
Not love--there was no love in the presentment of that twilight figure; not hate--there was no hate in the painting of her dim appeal.

Yet in the picture of this shadow girl, between the gloom and glimmer, was visible a spirit, driving the artist on to create that which had the power to haunt the mind.
Blanca turned away and went up to a portrait of her husband, painted ten years before.

She looked from one picture to the other, with eyes as hard and stabbing as the points of daggers.
In the more poignant relationships of human life there is a point beyond which men and women do not quite truthfully analyse their feelings--they feel too much.

It was Blanca's fortune, too, to be endowed to excess with that quality which, of all others, most obscures the real significance of human issues.