ld rather not
find out?"

He turned and met her shining eyes. She smiled, and he
had an instant of conviction. "You," he exclaimed--"you
did it! Really?"

She nodded, and he swiftly reflected upon what he had
said. "Now criticise!" she begged impatiently.

"I can only advise you to follow your own example," he
said gravely. "It's rather exuberantly cruel in places."

"Adorably savage, you _said!_"

"I wasn't criticising then. And I suppose," he went on,
with a shade of awkwardness, "I ought to thank you for
all the charming things you put in about me."

"Ah!" she returned, with a contemptuous pout and shrug,
"don't say that--it's like the others. But," she clinched
it notwithstanding, and rather quickly, "will you take
me to see Miss Cardiff? I mean," she added, noting his
look of consternation, "will you ask her if I may come?
I forget--we are in London."

At this moment the boy from below-stairs knocked with
tea and cakes, little Italian cakes in iced jackets and
paper boats. "Yes, certainly--yes, I will," said Kendal,
staring at the tray, and trying to remember when he had
ordered it; "but it's your plain duty to make us both
some tea, and to eat as many of these pink-and-white
things as you possibly can. They seem to have come down
from heaven for you."

They ate and drank and talked and were merry for quite
twenty minutes. Elfrida opened her notebook and threatened
absurdities of detail for publication in the _Age_; he
defied her, tilted his chair back, put his feet on a
packing-box, and smoked a cigarette. He placed all the
studies he had made after she left Paris before her, and
as she finished the last but one of the Italian cakes,
they discussed these in the few words from which they
both drew such large and satisfying meanings as do not
lie at all in the vocabulary of outsiders. Elfrida felt
the keenest pleasure of her whole life in the knowledge
that Kendal was talking to her more seriously, more
carefully, because of that piece of work in the _Decade_;
the consciousness of it was like wine to her, freeing
her thoughts and her lips. Kendal felt, too, that the
plane of their relations was somehow altered. He was not
sure that he liked the alteration. Already she had grown
less amusing, and the real _camaraderie_ which she
constantly suggested her desire for he could not, at the
bottom of his heart, truly tolerate with a woman. He was
an artist, but he was also an Englishman, and he told
hims