The eyes of most men would have lingered, perhaps, on one of Connie, which was taken, indeed, at her best period and in a remarkably effective pose, but Adams' glance brushed it with an indifference only unkind in its mute sincerity, while he sought the troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look, like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve.

He had never, even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was content to call his friend--he hesitated to condemn himself almost because he feared to question--but whenever he entered alone his empty room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage from her pictured face.

It was a face that had followed after the ideal beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm.
Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vision of an unrealised world--a vision which had expanded and blossomed in the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect.

The world she looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze of a golden temperament"-- the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man is to the body.

And it was this inspired divination, this luminous idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first small gray volume: "Is it possible that we can still see visions ?" A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward daily happenings of her life.