there is something in
impressionism, after all. Maisie, can't you see?'

'See? See what?'

'Nothing; only, I know that if I could get any man to look at me as that
man looks at you, I'd--I don't know what I'd do. But he hates me. Oh,
how he hates me!'

She was not altogether correct. Dick's hatred was tempered with
gratitude for a few moments, and then he forgot the girl entirely. Only
the sense of shame remained, and he was nursing it across the Park
in the fog. 'There'll be an explosion one of these days,' he said
wrathfully. 'But it isn't Maisie's fault; she's right, quite right, as
far as she knows, and I can't blame her. This business has been going on
for three months nearly.

Three months!--and it cost me ten years' knocking about to get at the
notion, the merest raw notion, of my work. That's true; but then I
didn't have pins, drawing-pins, and palette-knives, stuck into me every
Sunday.

Oh, my little darling, if ever I break you, somebody will have a very
bad time of it. No, she won't. I'd be as big a fool about her as I
am now. I'll poison that red-haired girl on my wedding-day,--she's
unwholesome,--and now I'll pass on these present bad times to Torp.'

Torpenhow had been moved to lecture Dick more than once lately on the
sin of levity, and Dick and listened and replied not a word. In the
weeks between the first few Sundays of his discipline he had flung
himself savagely into his work, resolved that Maisie should at least
know the full stretch of his powers. Then he had taught Maisie that she
must not pay the least attention to any work outside her own, and
Maisie had obeyed him all too well. She took his counsels, but was not
interested in his pictures.

'Your things smell of tobacco and blood,' she said once. 'Can't you do
anything except soldiers?'

'I could do a head of you that would startle you,' thought
Dick,--this was before the red-haired girl had brought him under
the guillotine,--but he only said, 'I am very sorry,' and harrowed
Torpenhow's soul that evening with blasphemies against Art. Later,
insensibly and to a large extent against his own will, he ceased to
interest himself in his own work.

For Maisie's sake, and to soothe the self-respect that it seemed to him
he lost each Sunday, he would not consciously turn out bad stuff, but,
since Maisie did not care even for his best, it were better not to
do anything at all save wait and mark time between Sunday and Sunday.
Torpenhow was