later, when all the lights were out in the rue Mueller and all
the doors wore closed, the slight figure of the boy Max might have been
seen by any belated wanderer slipping down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie
to post a letter--a letter that had cost much thought, and upon which
had been dropped many blots of ink; and had the belated wanderer been
possessed of occult powers and wished to probe inside the envelope, the
words he would have read were these--scrawled with bold impetuosity:

_Mon Ami_,--My idea--the true idea--has come to me. It was born in
the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge
that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am
one of the fools I talked of yesterday!

All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for
many, many days--many, many weeks--I shall be in my studio--locked
away even from you.

Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours--and all my
thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned,
understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.

MAX.

PART III

CHAPTER XXII

Of all the ills that circumstance forces upon man, separation from a
beloved object is, perhaps, the most salutary. Separation is the
crucible wherein love undergoes the test absolute; in the fire of loss,
grief softens to indifference or hardens to enduring need.

The pale blue sky of May smiled upon Montmartre. The shrubs in the
plantation shimmered forth in green garments, the news-vender by the
gate, the little old Basque peasant woman telling her beads in the shade
of a holly-tree, even the children screaming at play on the gravelled
pathway, were touched with the charm of the hour. Or so it seemed to
Max--Max, _debonair_ of carriage--Max, hastening to a _rendezvous_ with
fast-beating heart and nerves that throbbed alternately to a wild joy of
anticipation and a ridiculous, self-conscious dread.

How he had counted upon the moment! How he had loved and feared it in
ardent, varying imagination! And now, that it had at last arrived, how
hopelessly his prearranged actions eluded him, how humanly his rehearsed
sentences failed to marshal themselves for speech! As he climbed up the
plantation, dazzled by the sun, intoxicated by the budding summer, he
felt the merest unsophisticated youth--the merest novice, dumb and
impotent under his own emotions.

Then, sudd