Egypt, as a very old woman, clothed in the mantle of Zosimus--the lion
who was to bury her, couchant at her feet. Helbeck looked into it;
admired some points, criticised others. Williams got down from his stool,
talked with a low-voiced volubility, an egotistical passion and
disturbance that roused astonishment in Laura. Till then she had been
acquainted only with the measured attitudes and levelled voice that the
Jesuit learns from the "Regulae Modestiae" of his order. But for the
first time she felt a certain sympathy with him.

Afterwards for some days the young man, so recently an invalid, could
hardly be persuaded to take sufficient exercise or food. He was absorbed
in his saint and in the next figure beyond her, that was already growing
under his brush. St. Ursula, white robed and fair haired, was springing
like a flower from the wall; her delicate youth shone beside the age and
austerity, the penitence and emaciation, of St. Mary of Egypt. Both
looked towards the altar; but St. Mary with a mystic sadness that both
adored and quailed; St. Ursula with the rapture, the confidence, of a
bride.

The artist could not be torn from his conception; and upon Laura too the
spell of the work steadily grew. She would slip into the chapel at all
hours, and watch; sometimes standing a little way from the painter, a
black lace scarf thrown round her bright hair, sometimes sitting
motionless with a book on her knee, which she did not read. When Helbeck
was there conversation arose into which she was often drawn. And out of a
real wish to please Helbeck, she would silence her own resentments, and
force herself to be friendly. Insensibly Williams began to talk to her;
and it would sometimes happen, when Helbeck went away for a time, that
the cold reserve or _mauvaise honte_ of the Jesuit would melt wholly
before the eagerness of the artist--when, with intervals of a brusque