brick a
Wren portico in white-painted wood, together with the white facings of
the windows, produced an effect of vivid spotlessness, tempered by the
variegated foliage of climbing vines. The limitations of the open lawn
were marked by nothing but a line of shrubs.

Having arrived at the door, it was a relief to Olivia, rather than the
contrary, to learn that the ladies were not at home, but that Mr. Temple
himself would be glad to see her if she would come in. He had, in fact,
espied her approach from his study window and had come out into the hall
to insist on her staying. Within a minute or two she found herself
sitting in one of his big, shabby arm-chairs saying things preliminary
to confidence.

It was a large room, with windows on three sides, through which the
light poured in to find itself refracted by a hundred lustrous surfaces.
The first impression received on entering what Rodney Temple called his
work-room was that of color--color unlike that of pictures, flowers,
gems, or sunsets, and yet of extraordinary richness and variety. Low
bookcases, running round the room, offered on the broad shelf forming
the top space for many specimens of that potter's art on which the old
man had made himself an authority. Jars and vases stood on tables,
plaques and platters hung on the walls, each notable for some excellence
in shape, glaze, or decoration. Of Americans of his generation Rodney
Temple had been among the first to respond to an appeal that came from
ages immeasurably far back in the history of man. His imagination had
been stirred in boyhood by watching a common country potter turn off
bowls and flowerpots that sprang from the wheel in exquisite, concentric
forms or like opening lilies of red earth. Here, he had said to himself,
is the beginning of everything we call art--here must have been the
first intimation to man that beauty could be an element in the work of
his own fingers.

In a handicraft that took the dust of the earth to minister to man's
humblest needs, and yet contrived thereby to enrich his aesthetic life,
young Rodney Temple, as he was then, found much that was congenial to
his own mystical aspirations. During his early travels abroad the
factories of Meissen and Sevres interested him more than the Zwinger and
the Louvre.

He frequented the booths and quays and dingy streets of the older
European cities, bringing out from some lost hiding-place now an Arabic
tile in which the green of the