The Demon Lover

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It was a hot June day when I discovered my father’s secret which was to change the whole course of my life, as well as his. I shall never forget the horror that gripped me. The sun was brilliant, merciless, it seemed. It had been the hottest June for years. I sat there watching him. He seemed to have grown ten years older in the space of a few minutes, and as he turned his eyes to me I saw the despair in them, the sudden releasing of pretence. He knew that he could no longer hide this tragedy from me.

It was inevitable that I should be the one to discover it. I had always been closer to him than anyone else even my mother when she had been alive. I understood him in all his moods. I knew the exultation of the creative artist, the striving, the frustrations. The man I knew in this studio was different from the gentle, rather uncomplicated human being he became outside it. Of course it was the studio which claimed the greater part of him. It was his life. He had been brought up to it. From the age of five, in this very house -which had been the home of the Collisons for a hundred years he had come to the studio to watch his own father work. There was a story in the family that when he was four years old they had thought he was lost and his nurse had found him here painting on a piece of vellum with one of his father’s finest sable brushes.

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