as the thought that compelled his mind to
accept it. And then--"She will answer at once."

The difference in time between Santa Barbara and Gorston Old Hall was
about twelve hours; and fifteen days ago, he had posted his letter. It
was just possible, even in war-time delays, that it had reached her, he
calculated, as the eyes of the portrait held him spellbound.

When the picture was finished, he took its measurements and ordered a
glass to protect the fragile colors, delicate as the microscopic plumes
of a moth's wing. But he could not content himself with any design for
a frame. He went to shop after shop, and even traveled as far as Los
Angeles, in the hope of finding the right thing. But nothing was right
as a frame for Barbara. The handsomer a frame was, the more
conventional and banal it looked in Denin's eyes, when he tried to
associate it with her. At last he decided to carve out the frame with
his own hands, from the beautiful fluted redwood of the great sequoias
of California: wonderful, ruddy wood with an auburn sheen and a wave
running through it like that of Barbara's hair.

The idea seized him and brought extraordinary delight. He took three
lessons from an astonished cabinet-maker of whom he was able to buy the
redwood, and then with confidence and joy began his work. In two days
it was finished, and the picture in place. It was almost as if he had
built a house for Barbara, and she had come to live in it, and look out
of the door at him.

The portrait was half life-size; and rimmed in its rich fluted setting
of redwood a thousand years old, it was of exactly the right length and
shape to hang on the door of child-Barbara's bedroom--his bedroom now.
It was for that place he had planned it, because in these days he had
lost the unbroken privacy of his first weeks at the Mirador. John
Sanbourne had been "discovered," and without churlishness was unable to
remain any longer a hermit. He went nowhere, except for the long,
solitary walks he loved, and refused all invitations, but he could not
lock his gate against the three or four kindly persons who ventured
with the best intentions, to "dig him up" and "keep him from being
lonely." His memory-portrait of Barbara was too strikingly like her, in
its strange impressionist way, not to be in danger of recognition by
some old acquaintance of her childhood. Besides, a picture of his love,
even if unrecognized, was far too sacred to be seen by stranger eyes.
In