a fairly pleasant reverie. A little smile
curved about the corners of her mouth, half compassionate,
half amused and triumphant. She had barely time to banish
it when she heard Cardiff's step beside her, and his
voice.

"I had to come after you," he said; "I've let you carry
off my stick."

She looked at him in mischievous challenge of his
subterfuge, and he added frankly, with a voice that shook
a little notwithstanding--

"It's of no use--I find I must accept your compromise.
It is very good of you to be willing to make one. And I
can't let you go altogether, Elfrida."

She gave him a happy smile. "And now," she said, "shall
we talk of something else?"

CHAPTER XXIX.

March brought John Kendal back to town with a few Devonshire
studies and a kindling discontent with the three subjects
he had in hand for the May exhibitions. It spread over
everything he had done for the last six months when he
found himself alone with his canvases and whole-hearted
toward them. He recognized that he had been dividing
his interest, that his ambition had suffered, that his
hand did not leap as it had before at the suggestion of
some lyric or dramatic possibility of color. He even
fancied that his drawing, which was his vulnerable point,
had worsened. He worked strenuously for days without
satisfying himself that he had recovered ground appreciably,
and then came desperately to the conclusion that he wanted
the stimulus of a new idea, a subject altogether
disassociated with anything he had done. It was only, he
felt, when his spirit was wholly in bondage to the charm
of his work that he could do it well, and he needed to
be bound afresh. Literally, he told himself, the only
thing he had painted in months that pleased him was that
mere sketch, from memory, of the Halifax drawing-room
episode. He dragged it out and looked at it, under its
damaging red stripes, with enthusiasm. Whatever she did
with herself, he thought, Elfrida Bell was curiously
satisfying from an artistic point of view. He fell into
a train of meditation, which quickened presently into a
practical idea that set him striding up and down the room.

"I believe she would be delighted!" he said aloud, coming
to a sudden standstill; "and, by Jove, it would be a kind
of reparation!"

He delved into an abysmal cupboard for a crusted pen and
a cobwebby bottle of ink, and was presently sitting among
the fragments of three notes addressed, one after the
other