ir steps, fearful of
offending, and barely contrived to compose their features when making
their adieux to Mrs. Hind-Willet and the Countess d'Enver.

As they walked east along Fifty-ninth Street, breathing in the fresh,
sparkling evening air, she said impulsively:

"And to think, Louis, that if I had been wicked enough to marry you I'd
have driven you into that kind of society--or into something genetically
similar!"

His face sobered:

"You could hold your own in any society."

"Perhaps I could. But they wouldn't let me."

"Are you afraid to fight it out?"

"Yes, dear--at _your_ expense. Otherwise--" She gazed smilingly into
space, a slight colour in either cheek.

CHAPTER XI

Valerie West was twenty-two years old in February. One year of life lay
behind her; her future stretched away into sunlit infinity.

Neville attained his twenty-eighth year in March. Years still lay before
him, a few lay behind him; but in a single month he had waded so swiftly
forward through the sea of life that the shallows were already passed,
the last shoal was deepening rapidly. Only immeasurable and menacing
depths remained between him and the horizon--that pale, dead line
dividing the noonday of to-day from the phantom suns of blank eternity.

It was that winter that he began the picture destined to fix definitely
his position among the painters of his times--began it humbly, yet
somehow aware of what it was to be; afraid, for all his courage, yet
conscious of something inevitable impending. It was Destiny; and,
instinctively, he arose to meet it.

He called the picture "A Bride." A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in
which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour--a young girl naked
of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and
silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly
dropped back, white arms inert, pendant. And in her eyes' deep velvet
depths the mystery of the Annunciation.

All of humanity and of maturity--of adolescence and of divinity was in
that face; in the exquisitely sensitive wisdom of the woman's eyes, in
the full sweet innocence of the childish mouth--in the smooth little
hands so unsoiled, so pure--in the nun-like pallor and slender beauty of
the throat.

[Illustration: "'Where do you keep those pretty models, Louis?' he
demanded."]

Whatever had been his inspiration--whether spiritual conviction, or the
physical beauty of Valerie, neither he no