As to the environment in which Florimel found him, it was to her
a region of confused and broken colour and form--a kind of chaos
out of which beauty was ever ready to start. Pictures stood on
easels, leaned against chair backs, glowed from the wall--each
contributing to the atmosphere of solved rainbow that seemed to
fill the space. Lenorme was seated--not at his easel, but at a
grand piano, which stood away, half hidden in a corner, as if it
knew itself there on sufferance, with pictures all about the legs
of it. For they had walked straight in without giving his servant
time to announce them. A bar of a song, in a fine tenor voice,
broke as they opened the door; and the painter came to meet them
from the farther end of the study. He shook hands with Florimel's
friend, and turned with a bow to her. At the first glance the eyes
of both fell. Raised the same instant, they encountered each other
point blank, and then the eloquent blood had its turn at betrayal.
What the moment meant, Florimel did not understand; but it seemed
as if Raoul and she had met somewhere long ago, were presumed not
to know it, but could not help remembering it, and agreeing to
recognise it as a fact. A strange pleasure filled her heart. While
Mrs Barnardiston sat she flitted about the room like a butterfly,
looking at one thing after another, and asking now the most ignorant,
now the most penetrative question, disturbing not a little the
work, but sweetening the temper of the painter, as he went on with
his study of the mask and helmet into which the Gorgon stare of
the Unideal had petrified the face and head of his sitter.
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