Page:Wounded Souls.djvu/129

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XIX

Eileen O'connor had gone back from the convent to the rooms she had before her trial and imprisonment. I was glad to see her in a setting less austere than the white-washed parlour in which she had first received us. There was something of her character in the sitting-room where she had lived so long during the war, and where with her girl-friends she had done more dangerous work than studying the elements of drawing and painting. In that setting, too, she looked at home—"The Portrait of a Lady," by Lavery, as I saw her in my mind's eye, when she sat in a low arm-chair by the side of a charcoal stove, with the lamplight on her face and hair and her dress shadowy. She wore a black dress of some kind, with a tiny edge of lace about the neck and a string of coloured beads so long that she twisted it about her fingers in her lap. The room was small, but cosy in the light of a tall lamp, on an iron stand, shaded with red silk. Like all the rooms I had seen in Lille—not many—this was panelled, with a polished floor, bare except for one rug. On the walls were a few etchings framed in black—London views mostly—and some water-colour drawings of girls' heads, charmingly done, I thought. They were her own studies of some of her pupils and friends, and one face especially attracted me, because of its delicate and spiritual beauty.

"That was my fellow-prisoner," said Eileen O'Connor. "Alice de Villers-Auxicourt. She died before the trial. Happily, because she had no fear."

I noticed one other thing in the room which was pleas-