air streamed down her straight back
like a warm drift of autumn leaves. She had not finished dressing yet,
and the bareness of her arms seemed appropriate to that Hungarian dance
she played. All the room was permeated with the smell of paint, and
before an easel stood a girl in long unsmocked gown of green linen.
This girl Michael had never seen, but he realized her personality as
somehow inseparably associated with that hot-blooded Bacchante on whose
dewy crimson mouth at the moment her brush rested. Geranium flowers,
pierced by the slanting rays of the sun, stood on the window-sill of an
inner room whose door was open. Stella did not stop to finish the dance
she was playing, but jumped up to greet Michael, and in the fugitive
silence that followed his introduction to her friend Clarissa Vine, he
heard the murmur of ordinary life without which drowned by the lightest
laugh nevertheless persisted unobtrusive and imperturbable.

Yet, for all Michael's relief at finding Stella at least superficially
all right, he could not help disapproving a little of that swift change
of plan which, without a word of warning to himself before the arrival
of the telegram in Cornwall, had brought her from London to Paris. Nor
could he repress a slight feeling of hostility toward Miss Clarissa Vine
whose exuberant air did not consort well with his idea of a friend for
Stella. He was certainly glad, whether he were needed or not, that he
had come rather quickly. Clarie was going to paint all that morning, and
Michael, who was restless after his journey, persuaded Stella to abandon
music for that day and through the dancing streets of Paris come
walking.

The brother and sister went silently for a while along the river's bank.

"Well," said Michael at last, "why did you wire for me?"

"I wanted you."

Stella spoke so simply and so naturally that he was inclined to ask no
more questions and to accept the situation as one created merely by
Stella's impetuousness. But he could not resist a little pressure, and
begged to know whether there were no other reason for wanting him but a
fancy for his company.

Stella agreed there might be, and then suddenly she plunged into her
reasons. First, she took Michael back to last autumn and a postscript
she had written to a letter.

"Do you remember how I said that academic perfection was not enough for
an artist, that there was also life to be lived?"

Michael said he remembered the letter very we