go to Ashuelyn if your father and mother wish it.
They are old, dear; and it is a heartless thing to thwart the old.

"Don't think of attempting to come over here to see me. The chances are
that your family would hear of it and it would only pain them. Any
happiness that you and I are ever to have must not be gained at any
expense to them.

"So keep your distance, Monsieur; make your parents and your sister
happy for the few days you are to be there; and on Thursday I will meet
you on the 9.30 train and we will go back to town together.

"I am going anyway, for two reasons; I have been away from you entirely
too long, and--the First of June is very, very near.

"I love you with all my heart, Louis.

"Valerie West."

CHAPTER XIII

He never doubted that, when at length the time came for the great
change--though perhaps not until the last moment--Valerie would consent
to marry him. Because, so far in his life of twenty-eight years,
everything he had desired very much had come true--everything he had
really believed in and worked for, had happened as he foresaw it would,
in spite of the doubts, the fears, the apprehensions that all creators
of circumstances and makers of their own destiny experience.

Among his fellow-men he had forged a self-centred, confident way to the
front; and had met there not ultimate achievement, but a young girl,
Valerie West. Through her, somehow, already was coming into his life and
into his work that indefinite, elusive quality--that _something_, the
existence of which, until the last winter, he had never even admitted.
But it was coming; he first became conscious of it through his need of
it; suspected its existence as astronomers suspect the presence of a
star yet uncharted and unseen. Suddenly it had appeared in his portrait
of Valerie; and he knew that Querida had recognised it.

In his picture "A Bride," the pale, mysterious glow of it suffused his
canvas. It was penetrating into his own veins, too, subtle, indefinable,
yet always there now; and he was sensitive to its presence not only
when absorbed in his work but, more or less in his daily life.

And it was playing tricks on him, too, as when one morning, absorbed by
the eagerness of achievement, and midway in the happiness of his own
work, suddenly and unbidden the memory of poor Annan came to him--the
boy's patient, humorous face bravely confronting failure on the canvas,
before him, from which Neville had turned a