dies in
Cairo--two days before.

The recognition was mutual. The curiosity appeared upon their side.
To his horror he saw that they had stopped their carriage and were
descending.

"How interesting!" said Miss Falconer, with more cordiality than she
had shown on the previous occasion. "How very interesting! So you
are an artist--I do a little sketching myself, you know."

"You do happen in the most unexpected places," smiled Lady Claire.

The English girl looked very cool and sweet and fresh to the heated
painter. His impression of her as a nice girl and a pretty girl was
speedily reinforced, and he remembered that dark-haired girls with
gray-blue eyes under dusky lashes had been his favorite type not so
long ago ... before he had seen Arlee's fairy gold.

"We've just been driving through the old cemetery--such interesting
tombs," said the elder lady, and Lady Claire added, "I should think
you could get better views there than here."

By this time they had reached the easel and stood back of it in
observation.

Blue, intensely blue, and thickly blue was the sky that Billy had
lavished. Green and rigid were the palms. Purple was the palace.
Very black lay the shadows like planks across the orange road.

Miss Falconer looked as if she doubted her own eyes. Hurriedly she
unfolded her lorgnette.

"It--it's just blocked in," said Billy, speaking with a peculiar
diffidence.

"Quite so--quite so," murmured the lady, bending closer, as if
fascinated.

Lady Claire said nothing. Stealing a look at her, Billy saw that she
was looking it instead.

Miss Falconer tried another angle. The sight of that lorgnette had a
stiffening effect upon Billy B. Hill.

"You get it?" he said pleasantly. "You get the--ah--symphonic chord
I'm striking?"

"Chord?" said Miss Falconer. "Striking," she murmured in a peculiar
voice.

"It's all in thirds, you see," he continued.

"Thirds!" came the echo.

"Perhaps you're of the old school?" he observed.

"Really--I must be!" agreed the lady.

"Ah!" said Billy softly, commiseratingly. He cocked his head at an
angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own
amazing canvas out of countenance.

"Then, of course," he said, "this hardly conveys----"

"What are you?" she demanded. "Is this a--a school?"

"I?" He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it. "I
am a Post-Cubist."

Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him. "Oh, really," she said
vagu