I do wish you would cheer up, old chap,” said Wither sympathetically. “You are getting uncomfortable—like Mr. Mantalini's body, in the midst of our joyousness.”

He was lying curled up, as usual, on the sofa, smoking a cigarette. Kent was brooding over the fire. Fairfax had been rallying him from a doctor's point of view, and he had answered vaguely, striving not to let his friend's rough kindness jar too unbearably. He felt relieved when the doctor was called out to see a patient, and Wither and himself were left alone together.

“I suppose I am making an ass of myself. I have never felt miserable before in all my life, and it must be that I am unused to it——”

“It gets in your way like a man's court-sword on the first time of wearing,” said Wither.

“Somewhat,” replied Kent, with a short laugh. He did not mind Wither's jesting. It came spontaneously from the small, bright-eyed man—was in fact his natural language. “Perhaps it does. I'll get over it some day.”

“It will be all right when she comes back.”

“She has come back.”

“When?”

“Nearly a week ago.”

“And how are matters going between you?”

“I haven't seen her yet,” said Kent moodily, staring into the fire. “That is to say, I have seen her. I have lain in wait for her, so as to catch a glimpse of her as she passed by. But I have not met her.”

“And when do you propose going to see her?”

“God knows! I don't.”

“I don't know whether this is fin de siÈcle or whether it belongs to the glacial epoch,” said Wither, drawing a breath of bewilderment. “At any rate, has it never struck you, friend John, that being in love with a woman is no reason why you should be rude to her?”

“I have scarcely thought of that.”

“Then, by Jove, the sooner you can get it into your muddled head, the better. What have you been doing with yourself these evenings?”

“Anything to keep away. A meeting of the Geological, another of the Numismatic—a theatre, where there was just such another ass as myself. I couldn't stand it, so I went out and turned into the Empire and tried to find comfort in performing dogs. I have also dined out.”

“You must have been a cheerful lot. What did you say to your partner?”

“Nothing. She wanted to babble on, and I let her babble. Curse the whole thing!” he cried, smiting a block of coal with the poker, so hard that the chips flew over the hearthrug; “To think that it should be my fate to meet the only woman in the whole world who doesn't babble!”

“I should consider it in the light of a privilege,” said Wither.

The next morning, after a night's agony of indecision, he plucked up courage and tapped at the studio door. He entered. Clytie was alone, busily preparing her palette. She paused with the half-squeezed tube in her hand, and looked up at him without rising, her brows slightly knitted. He remained motionless, too, on the threshold, after mechanically shutting the door behind him. He tried to utter the little address of lame excuses which he had framed, but the words stuck, somehow, in his throat. He was only conscious that she was there, in the same room with him again, looking bewilderingly fresh and beautiful in her dark dress, with its dainty painting-apron, too simple almost for the rich colour of her eyes and hair and the stately bend of her neck. Yet even then he noticed she was a trifle paler than usual.

“I meant to have come to see you before,” he stammered.

“Why didn't you? I rather expected you,” she replied calmly.

She finished squeezing her tube, and taking up her palette-knife, went on with her occupation. Kent, instinctively conscious that it is a disadvantage to stand, when morally wrong, before a sitting person who is in the right, drew Winifred's painting-stool away from the easel and sat down.

“You might have come in, if only for five minutes,” said Clytie, as he made no reply. The hand holding the palette-knife trembled a little.

“I wanted to,” replied Kent, finding words with difficulty. “But I couldn't. I am very, very sorry if I have been rude. I am always doing things of this sort.”

“It is not very pleasant for your friends; and I suppose we have been friends.”

“Yes, we have been friends,” he replied, “and I hope we shall continue so—if you will forgive me.”

His voice sounded strange in his own ears. In Clytie's it sounded cold and formal. She was puzzled.

“Oh, of course I forgive you! You have made your apology.”

“Believe me—things have happened. I could not come before, indeed I could not.”

“I never doubted your word, Kent,” said Clytie, with a touch of her old soft manner towards him. “Only it seemed strange not to see you. One gets into a certain groove, and a change from it jars. You see how easy it is to become a Philistine. You are much more a child of the light than I am, in that you have got out of the groove quite easily.”

“You have no right to say that,” said Kent, rising.

“Well, perhaps I have not,” said Clytie, bending intently over her palette. “Anyhow, the fact remains that we parted friends before Christmas, and now that I have come back you are changed. I am very sorry—sorrier than I can say. I have valued your friendship and the help it has given me—I am unchanged, I think so—and, to be franker than my sex generally is, I may say, I am hurt.”

Kent misunderstood. He could not help it. He thought she was grieved at his friendship having changed to love, which the tone in her voice told him could not be returned. All had happened just as he had anticipated. She spoke more in sorrow than in anger; that was the only difference.

“If you would prefer that I did not see you again—or so often,” he said, twisting the brim of his hat.

The words estranged them still further. They were pathetic in their ludicrous inappositeness.

“That you must please yourself about,” replied Clytie, with a quick flush. “I have said all that my pride will let me say in the matter. If you prefer to break off our intercourse, well—so be it!”

“You know that I don't wish to do that,” he said in a low voice. “Let me see you sometimes. Could I see you this evening, for instance?”

“No; I am sorry, I am going—I am dining out. Some other time. You know my hours.”

He stepped forward and shook hands with her to say good-bye, thus breaking through an established custom between them of non-handshaking. He reflected on this a moment afterward. It seemed an omen of the dissolution of their friendship.

When he had gone Clytie felt as if she would like to cry. What did it all mean? Why did Kent wish to break with her? She put down her palette and sat in her chair near the stove. She felt unhappy, lonely. She was in that strange state of uncertainty about the present, which often takes the form, with women especially in certain moods, of a presentiment of future trouble. “I wish Winnie would come,” she half repeated to herself. But almost on top of the thought entered one of Mrs. Gurkins's curly-haired children bringing her a note. It was from Winifred, who was suddenly called out of town on business and could not come on that day to the studio. Clytie mechanically tore up the note and scattered the pieces over the coals. She was not subject to fits of personal depression—independent entirely of the artistic side of her life. But the air seemed charged with disturbing, conflicting elements.

Soon she roused herself and went over to her easel, where for some time she worked steadily. A lay-figure clad in a child's ragged frock stood near by and she painted in the lights of the skirt, with mechanical precision of touch. But her thoughts were far away. Then the face that she had painted attracted her attention. It was that of a child—merry and smiling—but with the little London street girl's precocious wisdom. It was cleverly executed. Clytie had seized the suggestion of the everlasting feminine in the face, accentuating it ever so little. It seemed to laugh mockingly at her, out of the canvas, as who should say—“Look at me. Child as I am, I am as old as the world, and I can tell you secrets that you know not of.”

“You wise little witch,” said Clytie, after a while, standing back, with head inclined in critical surveyal of her work. “I wish you could tell me what is the matter with Kent.”

And then for the first time Mrs. Farquharson's idle, jesting words came into her mind:

“Take care that he has not gone and fallen in love with somebody!”

And the child's old face seemed to add a mocking confirmation.

This would explain all: his sudden change, the stiffness of his letter; his shrinking from seeing her; the awkwardness of his apology; the vague phrase, “things have happened,” which had puzzled her. The more she thought of it the more probable did this solution seem. It caused her a little heaviness of heart. Certain strange imaginings had come to her, too, this week. She needed the strength of Kent's friendship.

There are no persons harder to read and easier to misunderstand than those of whom we are fondest. There are two common causes of mutual miscomprehension. First we take it too much for granted that we can read the heart of another human being; and secondly, we are too apt to conclude that affinities sharpen perception to such an extent that the unexpressed becomes luminously expressive. This is a curious fact, too little recognised in our minor problems in social statics. Clytie had fallen into the one error, Kent into the other.

For the first time in her life Clytie felt afraid. The sense of what was missing in her life dawned, half shadowy, before her. She was different from other girls of her age, more advanced, as the phrase goes. For the majority of women come in ignorance to emotion; they feel, before they realise that they are learning. But Clytie in her eager search after the roots of existence had learned much, with feelings as yet untried. In this knowledge, if as yet there was no sorrow, there was fear. If Kent had come to her at this moment with a passionate avowal of his love, she would have yielded to him. Her fear would have melted away into joyousness, the rich springs of her nature would have been opened, and her destiny would have been accomplished. But neither of them knew this. He was engaged in the humorous task of trying to kill love, and she was half consciously tending along a path strangely diverging from his.

She dined that evening at the Farquharsons'. Hammerdyke was the only other guest. It was a bright, cosy meal, and Clytie soon forgot her depression of the morning. Caroline was at her merriest, proud of her three companions—of each in an especial manner. George was mildly satirical, as usual. He wore his velvet jacket, in which he found more happiness than in his ceremonial dress-coat. His dry touch of humour was pleasantly antagonistic to Hammerdyke's stronger personality and downright views of life. The latter laughed heartily, almost boyishly at his rebuker, like one who is accustomed to indulgence on the part of others for caprices of action and language. These, coming from a lesser man, might have been repugnant to the sensitive; but from him they seemed to bear a physical justification.

As he sat opposite her, talking in off-hand, picturesque fashion of incidents in his adventurous life, Clytie could not help looking with a feeling somewhat akin to awe at the man who had gone through such things and could speak of them so lightly. She listened, interposed a question here and there, wondered what it would feel like to treat those memories in so familiar a fashion. A new page of life seemed to lie open before her, quivering with sensations beyond her ken.

“Didn't you ever feel horribly afraid?” asked Caroline, while he was sketching some of his more recent exploring experiences.

“I did so,” he confessed frankly, “but I had my devils well under control. I had the power to string a mutineer up on the nearest tree or to pot him with my revolver, and somehow they rather funked me. If it had entered their woolly heads to go for me all together they would have made short work of me—but no one liked to take the initiative.”

“Did you ever try kindness, on these expeditions—by way of experiment?” asked Farquharson.

“Not much. You can't afford to fool away your life for the sake of an experiment. Oh, no! my dear sir, the noble savage does not swarm much round about the slave tracks in Central Africa. The Zulus may be different. I don't know—I've never seen much of them—but Fuzzywuz and his neighbours can only understand brute force.”

“I don't quite see, now, how you got all that power,” said Farquharson. “Did you establish yourself as a little king—or what?”

“Oh, no!” returned Hammerdyke, laughing. “When I had finished with the Soudan I wanted to while away a few months in the interior, and as the Belgians wanted a road made through the forest I offered to see things were done straight for them. As for the authority—judicial and that sort of thing—one takes that as a matter of course. The niggers don't know anything about it, except that there is a white man bossing them. They think it's all right, so what does it matter?”

“Then you hire a set of woolly-headed navvies, and if they lapse from your standard of virtue, you shoot them—is that the idea?”

“Somewhat. In mere slips one employs the argumentum ad bacculinum. It isn't pleasant, but it's the only way.”

“You are not going back again, are you, Thornton?” Caroline asked, wishing to turn the conversation. She believed in Thornton, in his power by divine right to blow all the tribes of Central Africa from the cannon's mouth if it so pleased him, but she saw that George was not sympathetic. It was a sore little point with her that her husband did not share all her enthusiasm for Thornton. “You are going to settle down now, really?” she added.

“Who knows?” he replied. “All things become monotonous after a time—even playing potentate. That's why I am here—with the intention of giving civilisation a chance. Some fine morning I may wake up and think that it would be nice to have a little excitement, and then I may pack up my things and start for No Man's Land again.”

“It must be a stirring life,” said Clytie half aloud, with a quick glance at Hammerdyke.

“It is the best life. Action, excitement, keen enjoyment of everything! You should take a turn at it, George.”

But George shook his head.

“I have a wife dependent upon me. Otherwise you may be sure I would leave this effete and effeminate civilisation and start to-morrow.”

“I don't think you would do much good out there,” said Mrs. Farquharson candidly.

They finished dinner early and went up to the drawing-room, which not long afterwards was filled with the heterogeneous crowd that the Farquharsons loved to gather round them. This reception was instead of the ordinary Sunday one, and was in Thornton's honour, although it was not unusual for Caroline thus to change her evening, scattering warning post-cards the day before. Kent, being on the list, had received one that morning, and before he saw Clytie had been half wondering whether he should go to Harley Street. So he had put his question as to Clytie's evening engagement tentatively. Her somewhat evasive reply had decided him. He would not inflict his society upon her. As Clytie's eye wandered over the familiar figures in the drawing-room, she involuntarily sought for Kent's. It seemed strange that he should not be there, for during the autumn he had scarcely missed a Sunday. One or two friends came up and asked after him. On the occasion of one inquiry, Mrs. Farquharson and Thornton were standing by her.

“Who is Kent that everybody is talking about—if I may ask?” said Hammerdyke.

“Kent?” interposed Caroline. “Oh if you know Clytie, you must know Kent. They are a kind of Mentor and Egeria combination.”

“That's lucid,” said Hammerdyke, laughing. “I hope you will present me to him one of these days, Miss Davenant.” Clytie replied with a commonplace, smiling absently. She was sad at heart about Kent.

Soon Redgrave, the R. A. who had given Clytie her first encouragement in her art, came up to talk with her. He had been following her career with some interest. Since the exhibition of “Jack” he had not seen her, and he took the opportunity of offering his congratulations, criticising the picture favourably. Then he inquired after its successor.

“But I don't think you will ever become a great artist, if you keep to that semi-impressionist style.”

Being a portrait-painter of exquisite finish, Redgrave was prejudiced against the school of Degas. He mentioned his name with some acerbity.

“Talking treason again, Redgrave?” asked a thin, wiry man in gold spectacles, who had overheard. “Don't listen to him, Miss Davenant. He is archaic and eating his soul out with jealousy. There's no one in England who can touch you in your particular line. You stick to it!”

“You are quoting the rubbish you wrote in your paper, French,” said Redgrave, laughing. “Now, whom are you going to believe, this newspaper man or me?”

“Whoever will help me best to sell my pictures,” laughed Clytie.

“Then leave your future with me,” said Mr. French, rubbing his hands as he moved away.

“You didn't mean that?” asked Redgrave.

“A little. One must live. Higher art, to use the cant phrase, would satisfy one's soul's needs better—but it would not those of the body.”

Redgrave looked at her for a moment, as if meditating over her rich colouring and fine vitality. A body such as hers had its needs. He smiled a little sadly and shook his head.

“You would not sacrifice your life for your art?”

“No,” replied Clytie, with quick frankness, “I wouldn't. The fuller one's life, the fuller one's art. The one is a reflection of the other. At least it is so with me.”

“I'll paint your portrait one of these days for nothing,” said Redgrave somewhat irrelevantly.

Clytie flushed a little at the compliment.

“What are you going to put into me?”

“The question whether even the most emancipated of young women ever has art in her soul,” said Redgrave, with a quiet smile.

“I am going to paint a picture some day that will astonish you,” replied Clytie, with a laugh.

“Ah! So is everyone. When will that some day be? I hardly know a painter or a writer or a musician that has not something he is going to do some day—a three-act drama all ready, bar transcription on paper—a masterpiece all complete, bar the mechanical transference to canvas.”

“Oh, Mr. Redgrave, if you are going to moralise like that, I'll report you to Mr. Farquharson. You had much better sit down and take me round the studios.”

But Redgrave was carried off before he had time to begin, and Clytie joined a large group standing and sitting round the fire. They were the younger, less responsible members of the company, and were talking nonsense. Singleton, a clean-shaven, red-faced man and a minor poet, was explaining what he called the Physical Basis of Life. Professor Huxley, by the way, has treated the subject differently.

“The man who cannot dine,” Mr. Singleton was saying, “cannot feel. He has not his proper equipment of senses. He is an imperfection, a waster.”

“That does not apply to women, I hope,” said Mrs. Tredegar, a languid, well-preserved woman, who was suspected of hankerings after a long defunct Æstheticism. “I have been feeling all my life—and I can't remember to have ever dined.”

“I did once—at the CafÉ Anglais. By Jove, it was good!” interpolated a fair-haired youth, who leaped eagerly at objectivities in the conversation.

“Your enthusiasm does you credit!” said Singleton. “You'll die yet, of a hopeless passion.”

Then, turning to Mrs. Tredegar:

“Of course it applies to women. La femme qui dÎne, aime. Put it into French, and you see the force of it at once.”

“Ah, but if you put it the other way about. La femme qui aime——It is horrible; it takes all the romance away,” said Mrs. Tredegar.

“Oh, dear!” sighed Mr. Singleton, clasping his little plump hands resignedly. “Are we still to adore the well-conducted person who goes on cutting bread and butter? Oh, believe me, Edwin Smith and Angelina Brown can't love, any more than they can appreciate ChÂteau-Mouton. They possess for each other a faint current of sexual attraction, which produces between them a mild excess of amiability. A lot of vanity comes in, as they like to parade the possession of each other before the envious. They call themselves lovers, and follow the traditions they have been taught in the novels they have misunderstood and the hints they have received from observance of their friends. The furthest they can go is to clasp hands limply under a sofa-cushion, when they think no one is looking.”

“That's humbug,” said the youth. “I have been in love myself.”

“Precisely,” said Mr. Singleton, “and you know nothing at all about it. Cultivate all your senses first, my young friend, and then you may fit yourself for falling in love.”

“And how is one to begin?” asked Mrs. Tredegar.

“Well, first cultivate a choice taste in food, wine, and cigarettes. Then disabuse yourself of the idea that the angelic, either in man or woman, is in any way desirable; purge yourself of that clog to all true appreciation of sensation—that interfering bugbear which still survives with an effete superstition—known as a conscience; get into an Hellenic state of mind by joyous perception of the beautiful, and realise that the supreme cultivation of the ego is the ultima ratio of existence.”

“But then we should only love ourselves,” observed a dissentient.

“As self-knowledge is the beginning of all wisdom, so is self-love the beginning of all passion,” returned Mr. Singleton oracularly.

During the frivolous chorus that followed this remark, Hammerdyke crossed the room and sat down by Clytie's side. “You seem to be very merry over here. What is it all about?” he asked.

“It's only Mr. Singleton trying to play with paradoxes,” Clytie replied, laughing. “He is a chartered libertine, and nobody minds him.”

“That always strikes me as so odd when I get back to civilised life—the tremendous amount of talking one has to get through—and no one seems to get any further with it. Everybody seems bound to provide himself with a theory of life, as they call it—either sincere or paradoxical. Why do they do it?”

He had pulled his chair a little aside, so that, when Clytie turned round, they were cut off from the main group close by. She replied laughingly to his question, and the conversation took a light, personal turn.

“I seem to have known you so long,” he said after a while, “and yet this is the first time I have been able to say a word to you by yourself. I used to hear of you, you know, in Africa, when Caroline sent me a budget of news. I used quite to wonder what you were like.”

“Caroline and I are great friends,” she replied. “She has been very, very kind to me.”

“Yes—a good sort, isn't she? She used to keep me posted up in all kinds of things, as I say—you amongst them. At last I built up a little romance about you!”

“What a crash it must have come down with!”

“I am not so sure of that. Time will show. It was just after one of her letters that I read the story of 'Marjorie Daw,' which some good people sent me down with a package of books from Cairo. Do you know it?”

“I have read it, but forgotten it,” replied Clytie.

Now, she remembered it very well. The words had come almost involuntarily. She was a little angry with herself. But it was pleasant to lean back in the armchair, amidst the babel of voices and heavy cloud of cigarette smoke, and be talked to thus pleasantly.

“It's a pretty little tale,” said Thornton. “A man writes letters to amuse a sick friend—broken leg, I think—and describes an imaginary young lady living opposite him. And the broken-legged man falls violently in love with this Marjorie Daw and starts off to see her as soon as he is well—and is moved to much wrath when he finds out the truth. Well, I am afraid I must confess that I made a kind of Marjorie Daw out of you—although I haven't exactly come over in search of you. So you see that we are old acquaintances—on one side, at least.”

“Caroline must have been saying very foolish things about me,” said Clytie. “I remember Marjorie Daw now. I am not the least bit like her.”

“I never said you were,” he returned, looking at her boldly, a smile playing about the corners of his mouth. “I did not think so then, either. And since I am in for a kind of confession, I may as well say it did not occur to me that I should ever meet you. Now that we have met—under my cousin's wing, so to speak—I hope we shall make friends.”

“You speak as if we had quarrelled,” said Clytie.

“Well, I thought perhaps you might have been a little vexed at my confession. Are you?”

“No,” said Clytie, looking at him in her quick, frank way. “Why should I?”

Hammerdyke did not reply, but smiled and shrugged his shoulders a little.

“Well, since you are so particular as to the wording, let us be friends. For Caroline's sake,” he added after a short pause.

“Very well, for Caroline's sake,” repeated Clytie. “Only, you know I am a very humble person.”

“Oh, no! I know too much about you. You are by way of becoming a great artist—and it would be a privilege for an uncultivated barbarian like me. Tell me, how could we begin being friends?”

“Well, suppose you tell me some of the wonders you have seen.”

“'Anthropophagi, or men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders'? Very well—and you shall show me your pictures. Will you let me come and see them sometime or the other? Do!”

He spoke low, with a touch of softness in his voice. Clytie felt flattered, touched. It was a little tribute to her womanhood to be pleaded with, especially by a man who, in the eyes of the world, was a recognised heroic figure. There was a latent light, too, in the depths of his dark eyes, a sign of reserved power and strange, unknown forces, that pleased her strangely. All the day she had felt sore, ill at ease, with a little aching, chafing sense of loss. The time had seemed woefully out of joint, and the setting of it right again utterly beyond her powers. But now the world's equilibrium seemed more stable.

“I am not sure whether you would care for my pictures,” she said.

“Oh, I have seen those that Caroline has,” he replied. “I made her show them to me. I don't know what your art word is—but they seem to me to have a grip upon life that I like.”

He could not have chosen words more flattering to Clytie. They summed up bluntly the whole of her ambitions.

“You see, I like real things,” he went on. “Something I can catch hold of. All this talk of Art with a capital A, and metaphysical preciousness, is so much froth—at any rate to me. But perhaps you put a capital to it?”

“I do, sometimes.”

“Well, then, you will teach me what it means. Will you? It will be a way of teaching me something about yourself.”

“Oh, I am not worth your learning,” replied Clytie, with a laugh. “But you can come and see my pictures, if you like.”

“Thank you,” said Hammerdyke, as he rose in obedience to a beckoning glance from Mr. Farquharson, who was sitting on the other side of the room. “I will come as soon as you will let me. To-morrow, can I?”

He looked at her pleadingly, admiringly. Clytie was suddenly brought in contact with a new force, against which she felt powerless.

“Yes, you can come to-morrow,” she said