"The car? No, I walked--wanted exercise," said Anstice rather vaguely; and Sir Richard nodded.
"Then we'll have out the little car, and you shall drive us over if you will. And if you'll excuse me for a moment I'll just go and order it round."
He waited for no reply, but bustled out of the room as though in sudden haste; and left to himself Anstice turned over the little photographs he held and studied them with eager eyes.
Four of them were of Iris--happy little studies of her in delightfully natural poses. In one she was standing bare-headed beneath a tall date-palm, shading her eyes with her hand as though looking for someone across the expanse of sunny sand before her. In another she stood by the edge of the Nile, in converse with a native woman who bore a balass on her head; and even the tiny picture was sufficiently large to bring out the contrast between the slim, fair English girl in her white gown and Panama hat and the dusky Egyptian, whose dark skin and closely-swathed robes gave her the look of some Old Testament character, a look borne out by the surroundings of reed-fringed river and plumy, tufted palms. In the third photograph Iris was on horseback; but it was the fourth and last which brought the blood to Anstice's brow, made his heart beat quickly with an emotion in which delight, regret, wild happiness and over-mastering sorrow fought for the predominance.
It was a photograph of Iris' head, nothing more; but it brought out every separate charm with an art which seemed to bring the living girl before the man who pored over the print with greedy eyes.
She was looking straight out from the photograph and in her face was that look of half-laughing, half-wistful tenderness which Anstice knew so well. Her lips were ever so slightly parted; and in her whole expression was something so vital as to be almost startling, as though some tinge of the sitter's personality had indeed been caught by the camera and imprisoned for ever in the picture. It was Iris as Anstice knew--and loved--her best: youth personified, yet with a womanliness, a gracious femininity, which seemed to promise a more than commonly attractive maturity.
And as he looked at the little picture, the presentment of the girl he loved caught and imprisoned by the magic of the sun, Anstice felt the full bitterness of his hopeless love surge over his soul in a flood whose onrush no philosophy could stem. To him Iris would always be the one desired woman in the world. No other woman, be she a hundred times more beautiful, could ever fill the place held in his heart by this grey-eyed girl. With her, life would have been a perpetual feast, a lingering sacrament. Her companionship would have been sufficient to turn the dull fare of ordinary life into the mysterious Bread and Wine which only lovers know; and with her beside him there had been no heights to which he might not have attained, no splendour of achievement, of renown, even of renunciation, which might not have been reached before the closing cadence which is death had ended, irrevocably, the symphony of life.