glance, half-humorous, half-vexed. "Do you know I am
rather disappointed?" he said. "I had almost hoped that, just for once,
you know, you would be a little bit foolish."

"Not now that I've slept over it," replied Caroline, and they both rose
from the table, laughing.

The Marriage of Phaedra

The sequence of events was such that MacMaster did not make his
pilgrimage to Hugh Treffinger's studio until three years after that
painter's death. MacMaster was himself a painter, an American of the
Gallicized type, who spent his winters in New York, his summers in
Paris, and no inconsiderable amount of time on the broad waters between.
He had often contemplated stopping in London on one of his return trips
in the late autumn, but he had always deferred leaving Paris until the
prick of necessity drove him home by the quickest and shortest route.

Treffinger was a comparatively young man at the time of his death, and
there had seemed no occasion for haste until haste was of no avail.
Then, possibly, though there had been some correspondence between them,
MacMaster felt certain qualms about meeting in the flesh a man who in
the flesh was so diversely reported. His intercourse with Treffinger's
work had been so deep and satisfying, so apart from other appreciations,
that he rather dreaded a critical juncture of any sort. He had always
felt himself singularly inept in personal relations, and in this case he
had avoided the issue until it was no longer to be feared or hoped for.
There still remained, however, Treffinger's great unfinished picture,
the _Marriage of Phaedra_, which had never left his studio, and of which
MacMaster's friends had now and again brought report that it was the
painter's most characteristic production.

The young man arrived in London in the evening, and the next morning
went out to Kensington to find Treffinger's studio. It lay in one of the
perplexing bystreets off Holland Road, and the number he found on a
door set in a high garden wall, the top of which was covered with broken
green glass and over which a budding lilac bush nodded. Treffinger's
plate was still there, and a card requesting visitors to ring for the
attendant. In response to MacMaster's ring, the door was opened by a
cleanly built little man, clad in a shooting jacket and trousers that
had been made for an ampler figure. He had a fresh complexion, eyes of
that common uncertain shade of gray, and was closely shaven except for
the