that she had--at last--something to show him.
He smiled at the childlike secrecy of the announcement. She had
something to show him. Her illness, then, had not impaired her gift,
her charming, inimitable gift.

If she had something to show him he would have to go to her.

He let his eyes rest a moment on her signature as if he saw it for
the first time, as if it renewed for him the pleasing impression of
her personality. After all, she was Freda Farrar, the only woman
with a style and an imagination worth considering; and he--well, he
was Wilton Caldecott.

He would go over and see her now. He had an hour to spare before
dinner. It was her hour, between the lamplight and the clear April
day, when he was always sure of finding her at home.

He found her sitting in her deep chair by the hearth, her long,
slender back bent forward to the fire, her hands glowing like thin
vessels for the flame. Her face was turned toward him as he came in.
Its small childlike oval showed sharp and white under her heavy
wreath of hair--the face of a delicate Virgin of the Annunciation, a
Musa Dolorosa, a terrified dryad of the plane-trees (Freda's face
had always inspired him with fantastic images); a dryad in exile,
banished with her plane-tree to the undelightful town.

She did not conceal from him her joyous certainty that he would
come. She made no comment on his absence. It was one of her many
agreeable qualities that she never made comments, never put forth
even the shyest and most shadowy claim. She took him up where she
had left him, or, rather, where he had left her, and he gathered
that she had filled the interval happily enough with the practice of
her incomparable art.

The first thing she did now was to exhibit her latest acquisitions,
her beautiful new reading-lamp, the two preposterous cushions that
supported and obliterated her; while he saw (preposterous Freda, who
had not a shilling beyond what the gift brought her) that she had on
a new gown.

"I say," he exclaimed, "I say, what next?"

And they looked at each other and laughed. He liked the spirit in
which Freda now launched out into the strange ocean of expenditure.
It showed how he had helped her. He was the only influence which
could have helped a talent so obscure, so uncertain, so shy.

It was the obscurity, the uncertainty, the shyness of it that
charmed him most. It was the shyness, the uncertainty, the obscurity
in her that held him, made it difficult