r off you are
out there!' he says. 'You can show people the Gate, and keep them from
going the wrong way, on the long empty road. Nothing can hurt you, but
yourself. It is very foolish of _you_ to want to come in!'"...

She remembered that some fine thing had lit his eyes like stars at the
parting. Time came when she wished she had seen him at the studio, or
at her mother's house, when he called before going away.... The sharp
irony of her success brought tears--and Beth Truba was rather choice of
her tears. The portrait had made a stir at the Club, and the papers
were discussing it gravely.

It brought back the days in which he had come to the studio, and what
it had meant to her for him to move in and out. How dependent she had
become upon his giving! The imperishable memories of her life had
arisen from those days, while she painted his portrait. Beth realized
this now--days of strange achievement under his eyes--errant glimpses
of life's inner beauty--moments in which she had felt the power to
paint even that delicate and fleeting shimmer of sunlight about a
humming-bird's wing, so intense was her vision--their talks, and the
ride--well she knew that these would be the lights of her flagging
eyes--treasures of the old Beth, whose pictures all were painted.

It was hard to have known the joy of communion with his warm heart, and
deeply seeing mind--and now to accept the solitude again. She felt that
his going marked the end of her growth; that now it was a steady
downgrade, body and mind.... Some time, long hence, she would meet him
again.... She would be "Beth-who-used-to-paint-so-well." They would
talk together. The moment would come to speak of what they might have
been to each other, save for the Wordlings of this world. She would
weep--no, she would burst into laughing, and never be able to stop! It
would be too late. A woman must not be drained by the years if she
would please a man of flesh. She could not keep her freshness after
this; she had not the heart to try.... Thus at times her brain kept up
a hideous grinding.... She could feel the years!... Jim Framtree saw
them.

She had found a note from him two days old under her studio-door. He
had telephoned repeatedly, and taken the trip over to Dunstan to see
her.... Would she not allow him to call? And now Beth discovered an
amazing fact:

She had been unable to keep her mind upon him, even during the moment
required to read his single page of writing.