The day was interminable and wasted. He spent the morning fidgeting at his easel and lecturing Tootles with such severity that all the smiles fled from that young reprobate’s countenance and he sat gloomily on his stool, his head sinking into his collar, turtle-fashion, for one glance of displeasure from Dangerfield could plunge him into the caverns of despair. In the present case, the unexampled duplicity of Pansy, whom he had seen with his own eyes on the arm of the unthinkable Drinkwater, combined to send his thoughts wandering among such appropriate subjects as suicide and graveyards.

“What the deuce has he been up to?” he said to himself, watching Dangerfield, who was switching up and down in front of his easel like a circus leopard. “Drinking his head off last night, I suppose.”

“Hold the pose,” said Dangerfield spitefully.

“I ain’t doin’ nothin’,” said Sassafras, startled.

“You shifted that left leg! Throw it forward! More, so! Now hold it.”

“Hold it; hold it,” muttered Sassafras to himself.

“Mighty easy to say ‘Hold it; hold it!’ Like to see some one else stand on one leg a whole mawnin’ and ‘hold it, hold it!’”

Sassafras glanced over indignantly, but Tootles shook his head in mute warning.

“What the devil’s got into the charcoal!” said Dangerfield presently. He flung aside the piece he was using and selected another, but a few minutes later he broke out into an exclamation, and taking the canvas, brought it down savagely across his knee and flung it across the floor, after which he broke into a short, nervous laugh.

“There—I feel better—can’t work this morning—not in the mood—you go ahead—I’m through!”

He hesitated, picked up his hat, and went out. His mind had run away from him. Try as he might, he had not been able to fix it on the work before him. He felt upset, disorganized, restless, and immeasurably irritated that he should have lost control of his impulse at the very moment when he had been confident of a new birth of inspiration.

He wandered restlessly through ways which he had gone with Inga, ending up for luncheon at the little restaurant with the oyster-bar, where he had sketched with such avidity. Only, nothing interested him. The curious types of pedler and hybrid politician, the melancholy of the old rÉgime, and the audacity of the new generation, which he had seen and studied with avid eye and awakened imagination, to-day bored him immeasurably. He saw neither color, character nor life. They were dirty, cheap, and commonplace. The waiter, a young student from the University of Moscow, a year over, with whom Inga and he had had long interested conversations, came up eagerly, only to be greeted with glum monosyllables.

To some men, Inga’s evasion would have aroused eager senses of pursuit and possession. Not so, Dangerfield. All his instincts rebelled at this sudden disquieting and disorganizing intrusion across the slow ascent toward reclamation which had lain so clearly before him. Whatever her reason for her abrupt flight, he resented the loss of the morning’s work, the interruption of the happy impulse which had reordered the universe for him. He was angry not simply at the incident and the memories of past discouragement it awoke, but for what lay ahead—the fear of the future, the wonder whether he had not reached that period in his relations with Inga when his equanimity and the precious poise of an artist were to be constantly upset by the necessity of following vagrant moods. For he realized now how necessary the girl had become to him, to his restless mind that took fright at a moment’s solitude, to his awakening ambition, ready at a moment to sink back in discouragement, and to something deeper than mind or temperament—to the spark in him that still clung to his youth through the glorious youth in her.

“Why were women sent into the world, anyway?” he thought savagely, spearing a loaf of bread as though he were demolishing the whole sex. “Why have men been given a hidden spring of sentiment that makes a woman’s sympathy a necessity? And why must woman always come into man’s life to divert him from his object?”

What most irritated him was that he had thought Inga of different mold, and now she had suddenly been revealed to him as profoundly disquieting as her frailest sister. This feeling of resentment increased as the lack of her presence in his day made itself felt. He resented that she should have fastened him to herself. He resented that she should have shown a feminine capriciousness, and, most of all, he resented the fact that he should feel such resentment.

He was in this gloomy, destructive state of antagonism, amounting almost to revulsion against Inga, when he looked up and saw her entering the restaurant. She perceived him instantly, stopped, and made as though to withdraw. The movement roused a fury in him. His face grew stern and his glance remained coldly fixed.

“If she thinks I am going after, she’s mistaken,” he thought bitterly.

Perceiving that he had seen her, she checked her movement of flight and presently came over to his table, nodded, and sat down. He saw the furrowed pain on her face and the torment in her eyes, and divined the day of suffering through which she had passed. A sudden lightening of the spirit flashed through him, scattering the bitter clouds of dejection. He felt an uncontrollable gaiety, a leaping of the pulses, a need of laughter, of singing out loud, of music, and of sunlight. All his doubts vanished in a pervading sense of peace and serenity. For he knew that she loved him.

Yet they did not speak a word of what lay nearest to their hearts. Gregory, the young student, served them, and tarried to discuss political developments in Russia. Dangerfield, in fine feather, disputed eloquently, opposing his Tolstoyan theories of non-resistance. The transition from moroseness to ecstatic gaiety was so swift that he felt an impulse to work.

“What a pity I haven’t a sketching pad!” he said ruefully.

Gregory hastened to supply him paper and pencil. He laughed and began a series of rapid sketches of the oyster-openers; Mother Trekanova at the counter; a silhouette of a young Jewish girl in tinsel finery with an old rabbi watching in critical disapprobation. Inga, her hands clasped in front of her, continued to stare at the table-cloth, scarcely raising her glance.

Dangerfield completed a dozen sketches and sprang up lightly and satisfied, his mind busy with projects for paintings. Everything attracted him; the whole world was rich with points of interest—a black-haired woman leaning out of the window drying her hair, two young mothers with babies at their shoulders chatting before a kosher shop, a public school pouring out its color-flecked stream of alien races—all these notes of humanity seemed to him vibrant with the teeming will to live, to enjoy, and to drink in sensations to the fullest. He began to talk in long, loquacious periods, as he seldom talked in his sober moods—of the things that lay about him to paint, of the new quarters which they should explore, planning what they would do in the spring and the summer months, eager to be off. For, of course, he took it for granted that her opposition had ended. His enthusiasm was so obvious that she could not fail to comprehend the cause. Several times she glanced at his radiant face, wistfully and seriously, then looked away over the house tops or deep into the city crowds. When they came to the Arcade, she stopped him, and looked him full in the face.

“Mr. Dan, you don’t understand.”

His face clouded abruptly.

“Understand? What do you mean by that? And why—” he glanced impatiently at the tenanted Arcade—“why say this to me here?”

“Go up, I’ll come in an hour. I want to think,” she said gently. “Please don’t, don’t look at me like that.”

“Very well,” he said curtly, “You’ll be up in an hour?”

She nodded and stood while he went away, angry and in his blackest mood.