She was to meet the Clouds at Lucerne. She had hoped for Paris, but there was the Swiss-German adorer who would not be denied. Laura never found it easy to deny. So she spent a good-natured, chafing week in the Berne household, which, falling in love with her, enthusiastically and inexorably overfed her. From that hot-bed of sentiment and rich meals the train bore her away one fine spring morning, with a pimple on her tongue, but her duty done.

It was a bother being nice to people who bored you ... but it was the only way you could pay back the gods for being nice to you ... ran her philosophy. She only hoped the gods would go on being nice when they met again.... Two years was a long time.... Would the gods have altered much?... One can’t tell from photographs.... But gods don’t alter ... therein lies their godhead.... Now she, Laura——Oh, how she wondered if he would like her in long skirts?

The train fussed into the unplatformed station-way at half-past one, and tipped her out, as it seemed afterwards, onto the very lake edge, much as an elderly fairy, with a sense of duty, drops a stray godchild in elf-land for a week; and so puffed off again in its overworked fashion, leaving her, open-mouthed, before the enchanted hollow of Lucerne.

She might well gasp, forgetting her holiday, forgetting even “Justin-an’-Italy,” for long intoxicated minutes; for she was a painter, a painter unproven, a painter who had just sold her birthright for that same Justin-an’-Italy, but who was not therefore free of the torment of her eyes, her all-absorbing eyes and her itching finger-tips: and Lucerne was a portrait that day fit for the ten-leagued canvas and the brush of comet’s hair, a king’s daughter, glorious within, revealed and royal in a dazzle of blue.

It was a blue beyond belief, a blue enamelled thinly upon the gold plate of the sun, upon the antique-black of space itself. The great mountains, the rounded sky, the very air seemed carved, solidly, like the cup in the fairy tale, out of a single sapphire, fretted over with pearls that were clouds and the diamond glitter of the snow line, while far below the thin bridge lay across the lake like a felled tree in a clearing of English bluebells.

“My word!” marvelled Laura inadequately. “My word!” and then, with a deep breath—“Oh, my word!”

Her hand was at her mouth, hiding it because it trembled, as she stared and stared. She never outgrew that instinctive, characteristic gesture, that unconscious obedience to the law of her experience—“Never show what you feel.” Her delight in that triumphant blue was thoughtless, almost physical: she felt it whirl her like a wind. Yet, because she must always share her good things, at the back of her mind an indignant outcry began for “all of them” in forsaken Rue Honorine.

“My word! Wouldn’t they go mad! It’s a shame!”

She could see the broad thumb of Monsieur plastering an imaginary canvas with unctuous blobs and quorls, and the pretty pastel ardour of Elisabeth, and the despair of the water-colourists: she heard again the rumorous voice of the classe, the depths and shallows of appreciation, the shared delight in vision of those who have learned, who are learning to see: and then, mingling with those familiar voices, a voice yet more familiar, uplifted in the immemorial opening—

“Pretty good, isn’t it?”

“Justin!”

She wheeled. Beauty was forgotten, was a nothing, a phrase, a dead leaf. The high hills were cardboard, the sky a back-cloth and no more, for the well-to-do tweed figure, the one figure of Henry Justin Cloud.

And thus we teach Nature her place!

“Justin! Oh, how lovely! But you’re not due till four! Where’s Mrs. Cloud? I was just off to see the Lion. I thought there was time. You said four. Oh, I am disappointed. I meant to meet you properly, on the platform. You did say four!” She was comically unwilling to give up the picture in her mind, of herself on the platform and the train dashing in, and the faces at the carriage window.

He explained as they shook hands and beamed at each other—

“We changed our minds—started a day sooner to break the journey for Mother. She’s at the hotel. We could nip up and see the Lion still if you liked, while she has her nap. There’s loads of time.”

Laura was all eagerness and acquiescence, and they crossed the bridge and swung off at Justin’s pace up the sweep of the road. Not that she wanted to see the Lion qua Lion any more, though five minutes ago she had been as earnest a sightseer as ever read an illustrated Life of Thorwaldsen and What the Moon Saw. But as a mediary between her shyness and this stranger who was Justin, who had caught her before she had powdered her nose and put her thoughts in order, the Lion was invaluable. Justin, with a little help, would talk contentedly about him, and that would give her time.... Time for what? But that she could not have told you.

The truth was, of course, that the excitement that had sustained her for weeks was over, and its effect, like that of any other drug, wearing off. But she only knew that she was suddenly limp and shy. She smiled and talked with her mouth, but her eyes were quite grave as she watched Justin. She felt a forgotten, uneasily familiar sensation creeping over and through her, as a mist or a ghost goes through locked doors, a ghost that spoke with her own voice, whispering—“But—but this isn’t Justin? I had forgotten he was like this——”

And yet he was just the same as ever.... Not quite so tall, perhaps, as she had remembered him ... or she had grown taller.... He was pleased to see her, she was sure, but he had nothing much to say until they reached the Lion. The Lion was most helpful....

Justin explained to Laura that it was a Neo-Classic Lion, and therefore less admirable than the Lions in Trafalgar Square, which were from life—Zoo life. “I see!” said Laura. She was sure he must have been reading the same biography, but she thought she had better not ask him. But she did ask him why he approved of the Trafalgar Square Lions, when he had so often girded at ‘The Monarch of the Glen’ in Green Gates parlour. Justin, warming, said that Landseer was a photographer, but that photography was honester than imitation anyway, and explained that Thorwaldsen had got his ideas from the Assyrian plaques in the British Museum. They would look them up one day when they got home again and then she would see. All this, and now that he was once started, so very much more, with such a familiar air of unburdening himself, such an assumption of her entire interest, such an implied re-definition of her status as his particular property, that the ghost melted away again, as it always did when Justin smiled at her, and she said defiantly to the Lion—

“I don’t care. I like him this way.”