he picked up his palette and
brushes and began in silence.

* * * * *

That evening he went to see John Buries on and found him smoking
tranquilly in the midst of disorder. Packing cases, trunks, bundles,
boxes were scattered and piled up in every direction, and the master of
the establishment, apparently in excellent health, reclined on a lounge
in the centre of chaos, the long clay stem of a church-warden pipe
between his lips, puffing rings at the ceiling.

"Hello, Kelly!" he exclaimed, sitting up; "I've got to move out of this
place. Rita told you all about it, didn't she? Isn't it rotten hard
luck?"

"Not a bit of it. What did Billy Ogilvy say?"

"Oh, I've got _it_ all right. Not seriously yet. What's Arizona like,
anyway?"

"Half hell, half paradise, they say."

"Then me for the celestial section. Ogilvy gave me the name of a
place"--he fumbled about--"Rita has it, I believe.... Isn't she a corker
to go? My conscience, Kelly, what a Godsend it will be to have a
Massachusetts girl out there to talk to!"

"Isn't she going as your model?"

"My Lord, man! Don't you talk to a model? Is a nice girl who poses for
a fellow anything extra-human or superhuman or--or unhuman or
inhuman--so that intelligent conversation becomes impossible?"

"No," began Neville, laughing, but Burleson interrupted excitedly:

"A girl can be anything she chooses if she's all right, can't she? And
Rita comes from Massachusetts, doesn't she?"

"Certainly."

"Not only from Massachusetts, but from Hitherford!" added Burleson
triumphantly. "I came from Hitherford. My grandfather knew hers. Why,
man alive, Rita Tevis is entitled to do anything she chooses to do."

"That's one way of looking at it, anyway," admitted Neville gravely.

"I look at it that way. _You_ can't; you're not from Massachusetts; but
you have a sort of a New England name, too. It's Yankee, isn't it?"

"Southern."

"Oh," said Burleson, honestly depressed; "I _am_ sorry. There were
Nevilles in Hitherford Lower Falls two hundred years ago. I've always
liked to think of you as originating, somehow or other, in Massachusetts
Bay."

"No, John: unlike McGinty, I am unfamiliar with the cod-thronged ocean
deeps.... When are you going?"

"Day after to-morrow. Rita says you don't need her any longer on that
picture--"

"Lord, man! If I did I wouldn't hold you up. But don't worry, John; she
wouldn't let me.... She's a fine specimen of