"What have you been doing lately, Beryl? I hear Miss Cronin has come
over. But I thought you were not staying long. Have you changed your
mind?"

Miss Van Tuyn said she might stay on for some time, and explained that
she was having lessons in painting.

"In London! I didn't know you painted, and surely the best school of
painting is in Paris."

"I don't paint, dearest. But one can take lessons in an art without
actually practising the art. And that is what I am doing. I like to know
even though I cannot, or don't want to, do. Dick Garstin is my master.
He has given me the run of his studio in Glebe Place."

"And you watch him at work?" said Craven.

"Yes."

She fixed her eyes on him, and added:

"He is painting a living bronze."

"Somebody very handsome?" said Lady Sellingworth, glancing across the
house to the trio in the box opposite.

"Yes, a man called Nicolas Arabian."

"What a curious name!" said Lady Sellingworth, still looking towards the
opposite box. "Is it an Englishman?"

"No. I don't know his nationality. But he makes a magnificent model."

"Oh, he's a model!" said Craven, also looking at the box opposite.

"He isn't a professional model. Dick Garstin doesn't pay him to sit. I
only mean that he is a marvellous subject for a portrait and sits well.
Dick happened to see him and asked him to sit. Dick paints the people
he wants to paint, not those who want to be painted by him. But he's a
really big man. You ought to know him."

She said the last words to Lady Sellingworth, who replied:

"I very seldom make new acquaintances now."

"You made Mr. Craven's!" said Miss Van Tuyn, smiling.

"But that was by special favour. I owe Mr. Braybrooke that!" said
Craven. "And I shall be eternally grateful to him."

His eyes met Lady Sellingworth's, and he immediately added, turning to
Miss Van Tuyn:

"I have to thank him for two delightful new friends--if I may use that
word."

"Mr. Braybrooke is a great benefactor," said Miss Van Tuyn. "I wonder
how this play is going to end."

And then they talked about Moscovitch and the persistence of a
ruling passion till Braybrooke came back. He looked rather grave and
preoccupied, and Craven felt sure that the talk in the opposite box had
been about Lady Sellingworth and her "new man," himself, and, unusually
self-conscious, or moved, perhaps, by an instinct of self-preservation,
he devoted himself almost with intensity to Miss Van Tuyn till the
curtain