quite agreeable
to my having it back again for the same ten guineas. I used to go every
morning to the Academy to look at it. I thought it the cleverest bit of
work in the whole gallery, and I'm not at all sure that it wasn't. I
saw myself a second Teniers, another Millet. Look how that light coming
through the open door is treated; isn't it good? Somebody will pay a
thousand guineas for it before I have been dead a dozen years, and it
is worth it. But I wouldn't sell it myself now for five thousand. One's
first success; it is worth all the rest of life!"

"All?" queried the red-haired man from his easy-chair. We looked round.
The lady of the skirt had entered, now her own proper self: a young girl
of about fifteen, angular, awkward-looking, but bringing into the room
with her that atmosphere of life, of hope, that is the eternal message
of youth. She was not beautiful, not then--plain one might almost have
called her but for her frank, grey eyes, her mass of dark-brown hair
now gathered into a long thick plait. A light came into old Deleglise's
eyes.

"You are right, not all," he murmured to the red-haired man.

She came forward shyly. I found it difficult to recognise in her the
flaming Fury that a few minutes before had sprung at me from the billows
of her torn blue skirt. She shook hands with the red-haired man and
kissed her father.

"My daughter," said old Deleglise, introducing me to her. "Mr. Paul
Kelver, a literary gent."

"Mr. Kelver and I have met already," she explained. "He has been waiting
for you here in the studio."

"And have you been entertaining him?" asked Deleglise. "Oh, yes,
I entertained him," she replied. Her voice was singularly like her
father's, with just the same suggestion of ever a laugh behind it.

"We entertained each other," I said.

"That's all right," said old Deleglise. "Stop and lunch with us. We will
make ourselves a curry."

CHAPTER VI.

OF THE GLORY AND GOODNESS AND THE EVIL THAT GO TO THE MAKING OF LOVE.

During my time of struggle I had avoided all communication with old
Hasluck. He was not a man to sympathise with feelings he did not
understand. With boisterous good humour he would have insisted upon
helping me. Why I preferred half starving with Lott and Co. to selling
my labour for a fair wage to good-natured old Hasluck, merely because
I knew him, I cannot explain. Though the profits may not have been so
large, Lott and Co.'s dealings were not one whit more