mail train whizzed by another, side-tracked to await its
passing, Mr. Cardiff might have seen Kendal, if there
had been time to look, puffing luxuriously in a smoking
compartment, and unfolding a copy of the _Illustrated Age_.

CHAPTER XXV.

Before he had been back in Norway a week Kendal felt his
perturbation with regard to Elfrida remarkably quieted
and soothed. It seemed to him, in the long hours while
he fished and painted, that in the progress of the little
drama, from its opening act at Lady Halifax's to its
final scene at the studio, he had arrived at something
solid and tangible as the basis of his relation toward
the girl. It had precipitated in him a power of
comprehending her and of criticising her which he had
possessed before only, as it were, in solution. Whatever
once held him from stating to himself the results of his
study of her had vanished, leaving him no name by which
to call it. He found that he could smile at her
whimsicalities, and reflect upon her odd development,
and regret her devouring egotism, without the vision of
her making dumb his voluble thought; and he no longer
regretted the incident that gave him his freedom. He
realized her as he painted her, and the realization
visited him less often, much less often, than before.
Even the fact that she knew what he thought gradually
became an agreeable one. There would be room for no
hypocrisies between them. He wished that Janet Cardiff
could have some such experience. It was provoking that
she should be still so loyally _avengle_; that he would
not be able to discuss Elfrida with her, when he went
back to London, from an impersonal point of view. He had
a strong desire to say precisely what he thought of her
friend to Janet, in which there was an obscure recognition
of a duty of reparation--obscure because he had no overt
disloyalty to Janet to charge himself with, but none the
less present. He saw the intimacy between the two girls
from a new point of view; he comprehended the change the
months had made, and he had a feeling of some displeasure
that Janet Cardiff should have allowed herself to be so
subdued, so seconded in it.

Kendal came back a day or two before Elfrida's
disappearance, and saw her only once in the meantime.
That was on the evening--which struck him later as one
of purposeless duplicity--before the Peach-Blossom Company
had left for the provinces, when he and Elfrida both
dined at the Cardiffs'. With him tha