he time with Elfrida Bell, and a
fresh sense of injury visited him at having been
high-handedly debarred from that pleasure for so many
weeks. It staid with him and pricked him all the way to
town next day. He was a fool, he thought, to have missed
the chance of meeting her upon the opening days of the
London exhibitions; she was sure to have gone, if it were
only to scoff, and her scoffing would have been so amusing
to listen to. He thought gloomily of the impossibility
of finding her in London if she didn't wish to be found,
and he concluded that he really wanted to see her, that
he must see her soon--to show her that article.

The desire had not passed from him three days later, when
the boy from below-stairs brought him up a card. Kendal
was in his shirt-sleeves, and had just established a
relation of great intimacy with an entirely new subject.
Before the boy reached him he recognized with annoyance
that it was a lady's card, and he took it between his
thumb and his palette with the most brutal impatience.
"You are to say--" he began, and stopped. "Show the lady
up," he said in substitution, while his face cleared with
a puzzled amusement, and he looked at the card again. It
read "Miss Elfrida Bell," but the odd thing was down in
one corner, where ran the statement, in small square
type, "_The Illustrated Age_."

There was a sweet glory of May sunlight in the streets
outside, and she seemed to bring some of it in with her,
as well as the actual perfume of the bunch of violets
which she wore in her belt. Her eyes, under the queerest
of hats, were bright and soft, there was a faint color
in her cheeks. Her shapely hands were in gray gloves with
long gauntlets, and in one of them she carried a
business-like little black notebook.

She came in with a shy hesitation that became her very
well, and as she approached, their old understanding
immediately arranged itself between them. "I should be
perfectly justified in sulking," he declared gaily,
disencumbering a chair of a battered tin box of empty
twisted tubes for her, "and asking you to what I might
attribute the honor of this visit." He put up his eye-glass
and stared through it with an absurd affectation of
dignified astonishment. "But I'll magnanimously admit
that I'm delighted to see you. I'll even lay aside my
wounded sensibilities enough to ask you where you've
been."

"I!" faltered Elfrida softly, with her wide-eyed smile.
"Oh! as if that were of an