Page:Margaret Sherwood--A Puritan in Bohemia.djvu/108

100 her way of looking at things,—that was all she had striven for. Her thoughts drifted back to that summer afternoon in the Cluny Garden, when grass and trees and the queer bits of Gothic architecture lay deep in shade. The consecration of that hour could not have been a mistake. She reached vainly back for the inspiration of the mornings when she had crossed the Pont Royal on her way to the studio, and had seen the sun coming red through the mist behind the Nôtre Dame towers and the spire of the Sainte Chapelle. Her sight had been clear in those days, her purpose single.

She sat with a background of shadow, an unwonted look of self-distrust in her delicately cut face. The leaping flame on the hearth lit up the Winged Victory, and touched the sneering lips of the devil of Nôtre Dame.

"Anyway," she said at last with a laugh, "after wrestling with a Notion for four years, and almost getting the better of it, I am not afraid of a man. Whatever