y consequence!" She stepped
back a pace or two to look at an unpacked canvas, and
her expression changed. "Ah!" she said gravely, "how good
it is to see that! I wish I could remember by myself so
much, half so much, of the sunlight of that country. In
three days of these fogs I had forgotten it. I mean the
reality of it Only a pale theory staid with me. Now it
comes back."

"Then you _have_ been in London?" he probed, while she
looked wistfully at the fringe of a wood in Brittany that
stood upon his canvas. Her eyes left the picture and
wandered around the room.

"I!" she said again. "In London? Yes, I have been in
London. How _splendidly_ different you are!" she said,
looking straight at him as if she stated a falling of
the thermometer or a quotation from the Stock Exchange.
"But are you sure, _perfectly_ sure," she went on, with
dainty emphasis, "that you can stay different? Aren't
you the least bit afraid that in the end your work may
become--pardon me--commercial, like the rest? Is there
no danger?"

"I wish you would sit down," Kendal said ruefully. "I
shouldn't feel it so much, perhaps, if you sat down. And
pending my acknowledgment of a Londoner's sin in painting
in London, it seems to me that you have put yourself
under pretty much the same condemnation."

"I have not come to paint," Elfrida answered quickly. "I
have put away the insanity of thinking I ever could. I
told you that, I think, in a letter. But there are--other
things. You may remember that you thought there were."

She spoke with so much repressed feeling that Kendal
reproached himself with not having thought carefully
enough about it to take her at her letter's word. He took
up the card that announced her, and looked again at the
lower left-hand corner. "I do remember, but I don't
understand. Is this one of them?" he asked.

Something, something absolutely unintentional and of the
slightest quality, in his voice operated to lower her
estimate of the announcement on the card, and she flushed
a little.

"It's--it's a way," she said. "But it was stupid
--bourgeois--of me to send up a card--such a card. With
most of these people it is necessary; with you, of course,
it was hideous! Give it to me, please," and she proceeded
to tear it slowly into little bits. "You must pardon
me," she went on, "but I thought, you know--we are not
in Paris now--and there might be people here. And then,
after all, it explains me."

"Then I should like