It was on to the sensitive surface of this mood that a letter from Gwendolen, announcing her speedy arrival on the Riviera dropped like a dart, tearing the delicate tissues and stringing the fibres to the necessity for haste. Gwendolen, aunt-dragoned, and Baedeker in hand, meant the return to the acceptance of the old values that had once filled him with complacency. And yet, with all the jarring sense of intrusion that Gwendolen's advent instilled, there mingled a feeling that was almost relief--as though he were being saved, against his will, but with his judgment, from something too disturbing and beautiful to be quite comfortable.
Three or four days after receiving Gwendolen's letter, he put the last touches to the picture and informed Désirée he would need her no more. She received the news quite calmly, apparently without regret--thus do women tactlessly fail in what is expected of them. Archie felt absurdly flat as he wrapped up his wet brushes in a week-old sheet of the _Petit Niçois_. He also felt very virtuous, and told himself it was not many men who would have refrained from making love to the girl under the circumstances. It is astonishing what a comfortless thing is the glow of conscious virtue--it is bright in hue but gives off no warmth.
There was a little hut, used for stacking wood, close to where he worked, and here, thanks to the courtesy of the owner, he was wont to put his picture for the night. Désirée, as usual, helped him to carry it in and plant the legs of the easel firmly into the earthen floor. He had worked late, and the sun had just slipped behind the far ridge of the mountains; the tiny hut was filled with a deepening half-light, the stacked brush-wood seemed wine-coloured in the warm shadow, here and there a peeled twig stood out luminously. By the open door hoof-marks in the trampled earth showed that the patronne's mule had been carrying away wood that morning. That was as palpable as the fact that it must have been Sylvestre's deformed foot which had soiled Archie's sheet, yet those marks re-created the atmosphere of his dream, and seemed, in the sudden confusion mounting to his brain at the warmth and nearness of Désirée, to mix madly with Sylvestre, and rustled undergrowth and the glimmer of elusive hoofs round myrtle-bushes--and the glimmer of something whiter and more elusive still.