did Mr. Heldar dine out at all while I was out of town?"
"Never laid 'is dress-clothes out once, sir, all the time. Mostly 'e dined in; but 'e brought some most remarkable young gentlemen up 'ere after theatres once or twice. Remarkable fancy they was. You gentlemen on the top floor does very much as you likes, but it do seem to me, sir, droppin' a walkin'-stick down five flights o' stairs an' then goin' down four abreast to pick it up again at half-past two in the mornin', singin' 'Bring back the whiskey, Willie darlin','—not once or twice, but scores o' times,—isn't charity to the other tenants. What I say is, 'Do as you would be done by.' That's my motto."
"Of course! of course! I'm afraid the top floor isn't the quietest in the house."
"I make no complaints, sir. I have spoke to Mr. Heldar friendly, an' he laughed, an' did me a picture of the missis that is as good as a coloured print. It 'asn't the high shine of a photograph, but what I say is, 'Never look a gift-horse in the mouth.' Mr. Heldar's dress-clothes 'aven't been on him for weeks."
"Then it's all right," said Torpenhow to himself. "Orgies are healthy, and Dick has a head of his own, but when it comes to women making eyes I'm not so certain,—Binkie, never you be a man, little dorglums. They're contrary brutes, and they do things without any reason."
Dick had turned northward across the Park, but he was walking in the spirit on the mud-flats with Maisie. He laughed aloud as he remembered the day when he had decked Amomma's horns with the ham-frills, and Maisie, white with rage, had cuffed him. How long those four years seemed in review, and how closely Maisie was connected with every hour of them! Storm across the sea, and Maisie in a gray dress on the beach, sweeping her drenched hair out of her eyes and laughing at the homeward race of the fishing-smacks; hot sunshine on the mud-flats, and Maisie sniffing scornfully, with her chin in the air; Maisie flying before the wind that threshed the foreshore and drove the sand like small shot about her ears; Maisie, very composed and independent, telling lies to Mrs. Jennett while Dick supported her with coarser perjuries; Maisie picking her way delicately from stone to stone, a pistol in her hand and her teeth firm-set; and Maisie in a gray dress sitting on the grass between the mouth of a cannon and a nodding yellow sea-poppy. The pictures passed before him one by one, and the last stayed the longest.
Dick was perfectly happy with a quiet peace that was as new to his mind as it was foreign to his experiences. It never occurred to him that there might be other calls upon his time than loafing across the Park in the forenoon.
"There's a good working light now," he said, watching his shadow placidly. "Some poor devil ought to be grateful for this. And there's Maisie."
She was walking towards him from the Marble Arch, and he saw that no mannerism of her gait had been changed. It was good to find her still Maisie, and, so to speak, his next-door neighbour. No greeting passed between them, because there had been none in the old days.
"What are you doing out of your studio at this hour?" said Dick, as one who was entitled to ask.
"Idling. Just idling. I got angry with a chin and scraped it out. Then I left it in a little heap of paint-chips and came away."
"I know what palette-knifing means. What was the piccy?"
"A fancy head that wouldn't come right,—horrid thing!"
"I don't like working over scraped paint when I'm doing flesh. The grain comes up woolly as the paint dries."
"Not if you scrape properly." Maisie waved her hand to illustrate her methods. There was a dab of paint on the white cuff. Dick laughed.
"You're as untidy as ever."
"That comes well from you. Look at your own cuff."
"By Jove, yes! It's worse than yours. I don't think we've much altered in anything. Let's see, though." He looked at Maisie critically. The pale blue haze of an autumn day crept between the tree-trunks of the Park and made a background for the gray dress, the black velvet toque above the black hair, and the resolute profile.
"No, there's nothing changed. How good it is! D'you remember when I fastened your hair into the snap of a hand-bag?"
Maisie nodded, with a twinkle in her eyes, and turned her full face to Dick.
"Wait a minute," said he. "That mouth is down at the corners a little. Who's been worrying you, Maisie?"
"No one but myself. I never seem to get on with my work, and yet I try hard enough, and Kami says——"
"'Continuez, mesdemoiselles. Continuez toujours, mes enfants.' Kami is depressing. I beg your pardon."
"Yes, that's what he says. He told me last summer that I was doing better and he'd let me exhibit this year."
"Not in this place, surely?"
"Of course not. The Salon."
"You fly high."
"I've been beating my wings long enough. Where do you exhibit, Dick?"
"I don't exhibit. I sell."
"What is your line, then?"
"Haven't you heard?" Dick's eyes opened. Was this thing possible? He cast about for some means of conviction. They were not far from the Marble Arch. "Come up Oxford Street a little and I'll show you."
A small knot of people stood round a print-shop that Dick knew well.
"Some reproduction of my work inside," he said, with suppressed triumph. Never before had success tasted so sweet upon the tongue. "You see the sort of things I paint. D'you like it?"
Maisie looked at the wild whirling rush of a field-battery going into action under fire. Two artillery-men stood behind her in the crowd.
"They've chucked the off lead-'orse" said one to the other. "'E's tore up awful, but they're makin' good time with the others. That lead-driver drives better nor you, Tom. See 'ow cunnin' 'e's nursin' 'is 'orse."
"Number Three'll be off the limber, next jolt," was the answer.
"No, 'e won't. See 'ow 'is foot's braced against the iron? 'E's all right."
Dick watched Maisie's face and swelled with joy—fine, rank, vulgar triumph. She was more interested in the little crowd than in the picture.
That was something that she could understand.
"And I wanted it so! Oh, I did want it so!" she said at last, under her breath.
"Me,—all me!" said Dick, placidly. "Look at their faces. It hits 'em. They don't know what makes their eyes and mouths open; but I know. And I know my work's right."
"Yes. I see. Oh, what a thing to have come to one!"
"Come to one, indeed! I had to go out and look for it. What do you think?"
"I call it success. Tell me how you got it."
They returned to the Park, and Dick delivered himself of the saga of his own doings, with all the arrogance of a young man speaking to a woman.
From the beginning he told the tale, the I—I—I's flashing through the records as telegraph-poles fly past the traveller. Maisie listened and nodded her head. The histories of strife and privation did not move her a hair's-breadth. At the end of each canto he would conclude, "And that gave me some notion of handling colour," or light, or whatever it might be that he had set out to pursue and understand. He led her breathless across half the world, speaking as he had never spoken in his life before.
And in the flood-tide of his exaltation there came upon him a great desire to pick up this maiden who nodded her head and said, "I understand. Go on,"—to pick her up and carry her away with him, because she was Maisie, and because she understood, and because she was his right, and a woman to be desired above all women.
Then he checked himself abruptly. "And so I took all I wanted," he said, "and I had to fight for it. Now you tell."
Maisie's tale was almost as gray as her dress. It covered years