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278 We believe the devil to be sharp-sighted, but his disciples, at least, are occasionally baffled by conduct of which they cannot even conceive the mainsprings. Melchior watched Alaric Baring and Elizabeth closely. He had seldom before come into contact with a man of the American painter's temperament; never with a woman pure-minded and independent of action, with a pride and force of will to conceal her natural inclinations, as Elizabeth did before him. He had come prepared to find that the girl nourished a hopeless passion for the painter, whose cold nature probably did not respond to hers; or it might be just the contrary. As the brother of her friend she might be anxious to help him in every way, short of giving him the love he asked. For love, as conceived by Melchior, was nothing but an animal passion, which could not long support the strain of companionship without possession. The attitude of these two persons towards each other did not fit in with either of these theories. He found the man and girl apparently mutually cool and friendly, with no evidence of restraint, no expression of unacknowledged misery, no attempt to attract on either side. The women were friends, and the English one, with that whimsical benevolence of which he had heard before now, chose secretly to purchase her friend's brother's picture—with money how obtained? How? Oh, she had probably a rich lover, who occasionally gave her leave of absence to indulge her eccentricity and romance by wandering about alone, ostensibly to study painting. This would hardly be possible, indeed, were the lover a Frenchman; but the English were such a strange nation, there was no saying what one of them