'You do not know what it is to me to see his living face--you will call it an illusion--it seems as if----' She broke off suddenly and pressed her handkerchief to her lips again.
'Only what you call the unreal can last unchanged for a while,' the painter said, catching at the word she had used, and thinking more of his art than of her.

'Only an ideal can be eternal, but every honest attempt to give it shape has a longer life than any living creature.
Nature makes only to destroy, but art creates for the very sake of preserving the beautiful.' She heard each sentence, but was too absorbed in the portrait to follow his meaning closely.

Perhaps it would have escaped her if she had tried.
'Only good and evil are everlasting,' she said, almost unconsciously repeating words she had heard somewhere when she was a child.
Durand looked at her quickly, but he saw that she was not really thinking.
'What is "good" ?' he asked, as if he were sure that there was no answer to the question.
It attracted her attention, and she turned to him; she was coming back to life.
'Whatever helps people is good,' she said.
'The French proverb says "Help thyself and God will help thee,"' suggested Durand.
'No, it should be "Help others, and God will help you,"' Angela answered.
The artist fixed his eyes on her as he nodded a silent assent; and suddenly, though her face was so changed, he knew it was more like his portrait of her than ever, and that the prophecy of his hand was coming to fulfilment.
He stayed a moment longer, and asked if he could be of any service to her or Madame Bernard.

She thanked him vaguely, and almost smiled.

He felt instinctively that she was thinking of what she had last said, and was wishing that some one would tell her how she might do something for others, rather than that another should do anything for her.
She went with him to the door at the head of the stairs and let him out herself.
'Thank you,' she said, 'thank you! You don't know what you have done for me!' He looked at her in thoughtful silence for a few seconds, holding her hand as if they were old friends.
'There is no such thing as death,' he said gravely.
And with this odd speech he left her and went slowly down the narrow stone steps; and though she watched him till he disappeared at the next landing, he did not once turn his head.
When she was in the sitting-room she set the framed picture on a straight chair near the window and sat down before it in her accustomed seat; and Durand's last words came back to her again and again, as if they were begging to be remembered and understood.