it--can you use it?"

"You'll see!" He sat down, continuing almost apologetically, "I worried
more about the effect on others than on myself. It was that threw me
down, a fear that other people might think I was some pretentious fool
who had come here to get over big things and stumbled at the first
little one. I was deathly afraid of hurting other people."

His eyes had been steadily upon hers with an under-current of
consciousness for what he would have called the "queerness" of her look,
a baffling look that hinted of many things--of sympathy, consternation,
rejoicing, even of embarrassment, and yet it had not distinctly been any
one of these, so quick had been the play of light in her eyes to the
moment they fell before his.

She released her breath with a sound like a sigh, as if she had been
holding it, and there was another look in her eyes when she at last
raised them to his, one that he could not read, save that it was wholly
serious and, he felt, peculiarly a woman's look.

"I am sure," she began, "that no one--no one you consider in this way,
could think less of you for a failure. You ought to know that. I want
you to know it." She rose from her chair and stepped to the table with a
little shrug, turning over the leaves of a magazine, her back toward
him. At last she turned her head only, looking at him over one shoulder
and speaking with a laughing, reckless impatience.

"Oh, fail--fail--fail as often as you like--fail a hundred times and
then--fail." He felt his cheeks burning under her vehemence. She turned
about, facing him squarely.

"Have I said enough? Do you know what I think of failures now?"

He rose and stood before her. "You don't know what you've done for me.
You don't know--" Again came that crude impulse to take her in his arms.
It left him feeling like a criminal. As if she had discerned this she
resumed her seat, speaking quickly.

"Go back to that studio and do things. Do them your own way. It's a
better way for you than any they can teach you, and the next time----"

"The next time I have a hell----"

"--a hell of doubt--don't wait--come to me." She rose from her chair.

"You don't know all this has meant to me," he said feelingly as she gave
him her hand.

"Good night!" And though the gray eyes were hidden from his, there was
the look in them of one who knows more than she is thought to know.

As Ewing went out the man was admitting the younger Teevan, who asked
for Mrs. Lai