the artist and his world--between a master who has suffered, and
all humanity who understands.

The world seemed to recognise this subtle bond between themselves and
Querida's pictures. Yet in the pictures there was never any sadness. Had
Querida ever suffered? Was it in that olive-skinned, soft-voiced young
man to suffer?--a man apparently all grace and unruffled surface and
gentle charm--a man whose placid brow remained smooth and untroubled by
any line of perplexity or of sorrow.

And as Neville studied his own canvas coolly, logically, with an
impersonal scrutiny that almost amounted to hostility, he wondered what
it was in Querida's work that still remained absent in his. He felt its
absence but he could not define what it was that was absent, could not
discover the nature of it. He really began to feel the lack of it in his
work, but he searched his canvas and his own heart in vain for any
vacuum unfilled.

[Illustration: "He stood before it, searching in it for any hint of
that elusive and mysterious _something_"]

Then, too, had he himself not suffered? What had that restless,
miserable winter meant, if it had not meant sorrow? He _had_
suffered--blindly it is true until the truth of his love for Valerie had
suddenly confronted him. Yet that restless pain--and the intense emotion
of their awakening--all the doubts, all the anxieties--the wonder and
happiness and sadness in the imminence of that strange future impending
for them both--had altered nothing in his work--brought into it no new
quality--unless, as he thought, it had intensified to a dazzling
brilliancy the same qualities which already had made his work famous.

"It's all talk," he said to himself--"it's sentimental jargon, precious
twaddle--all this mysterious babble about occult quality and humanity
and sympathy. If Jose Querida has the capacity of a chipmunk for mental
agony, I've lost my bet that he hasn't."

And all the time he was conscious that there _was_ something about
Querida's work which made that work great; and that it was not in his
own work, and that his own work was not great, and never had been great.

"But it will be," he said rather grimly to himself one day, turning with
a shrug from his amazing canvas and pulling the unfinished portrait of
Valerie into the cold north light.

For a long while he stood before it, searching in it for any hint of
that elusive and mysterious _something_, and found none.

Moreover there was in