You see, after your father died, I kept yours--I never meant them to have it, but it seemed as if I owed you something for it, and this is to pay my debt.
Do you see ?' 'How kind you are!' she cried.

'How very, very kind! I do not quite follow the idea--my head is always so tired now--but I knew you would understand how I should feel--if I accepted it without any return!' So far as arithmetic went, the man of genius and the broken-hearted girl were equally far from ordinary reckoning.

Durand knew that by a turn of luck he had been able to keep the only portrait he had ever been sorry to part with when it was finished, and he was intimately convinced that he owed somebody something for such an unexpected pleasure; on her side, Angela was quite sure that unless the portrait of the man she had loved was to be an equivalent for some sort of obligation she could not be satisfied to keep it all her life unpaid for.
It filled the little sitting-room with light and colour, as a Titian might have done; it was as intensely alive as Giovanni Severi had been--the eyes were full of those quick little coruscations of fire that had made them so unlike those of other men, the impulsive nostrils seemed to quiver, the healthy young blood seemed to come and go in the tanned cheeks, the square shoulders were just ready to make that quick, impatient little movement that had been so characteristic of him, so like the sudden tension of every muscle when a thoroughbred scents sport or danger.

No ordinary artist would ever have seen all there was in the man, even in a dozen sittings, but the twin gifts of sight and memory had unconsciously absorbed and held the whole, and a skill that was never outdone in its time had made memory itself visible on the canvas.

Something that was neither a 'harmless illness' nor a 'miracle' had waked Angela from her torpor.
'How can I thank you ?' she asked, after a long pause.