Page:Claire Ambler (1928).djvu/152

 nothing except picturesque effects. When Claire was nineteen and her father died, she had been truly grief-stricken; but the artist was present at his funeral; and she sometimes remembered with amazement that it was the artist who made her bow her head at the cemetery. This was a recollection she always hurried out of her thoughts, lest the amazement become shame.

"Heaven, please tell me," she said now, in her cell bedroom in Raona. "What's the matter with me? What am I? Can't I ever in my whole life do anything natural?"

For it seemed to her that she was in love with the broken Englishman. "Something about him," as she thought, had roused a depth of feeling she had not known before; his worn, fine face, retaining the haggard outlines of what had been a conspicuous manly beauty, was always before her, whether her actual eyes beheld it or not; the thought of him haunted her with pain and a strange joy; and she wanted him to know it. There had been days when Orbison, lying pallid in his chair in the garden, seemed almost to be dying; and she had wished to go to his side and kneel and say, "Let me die with you, dear." But even that was the picturesque impulse; she knew she would