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‘Ah, what is her name?’ Lyon asked, most attentive. The details always began to multiply, to abound, when once his companion was well launched–they flowed forth in battalions.

‘It’s Pearson–Harriet Pearson; but she used to call herself Grenadine–wasn’t that a rum appellation? Grenadine–Geraldine–the jump was easy.’ Lyon was charmed with the promptitude of this response, and his interlocutor went on: ‘I hadn’t thought of her for years–I had quite lost sight of her. I don’t know what her idea is, but practically she’s harmless. As I came in I thought I saw her a little way up the road. She must have found out I come here and have arrived before me. I daresay–or rather I’m sure–she is waiting for me there now.’

‘Hadn’t you better have protection?’ Lyon asked, laughing.

‘The best protection is five shillings–I’m willing to go that length. Unless indeed she has a bottle of vitriol. But they only throw vitriol on the men who have deceived them, and I never deceived her–I told her the first time I saw her that it wouldn’t do. Oh, if she’s there we’ll walk a little way together and talk it over and, as I say, I’ll go as far as five shillings.’

‘Well,’ said Lyon, ‘I’ll contribute another five.’ He felt that this was little to pay for his entertainment.

That entertainment was interrupted however for the time by the Colonel’s departure. Lyon hoped for a letter recounting the fictive sequel; but apparently his brilliant sitter did not operate with the pen. At any rate he left town without writing; they had taken a rendezvous for three months later. Oliver Lyon always passed the holidays in the same way; during the first weeks he paid a visit to his elder brother, the happy possessor, in the south of England, of a rambling old house with formal gardens, in which he delighted, and then he went abroad–usually to Italy or Spain. This year he carried out his custom after taking a last look at his all but finished work and feeling as nearly pleased with it as he ever felt with the translation of the idea by the hand–always, as it seemed to him, a pitiful compromise. One yellow afternoon, in the country, as he was smoking his pipe on one of the old terraces he was seized with the desire to see it again and do two or three things more to it: he had thought of it so often while he lounged there. The impulse was too strong to be dismissed, and though he expected to return to town in the course of another week he was unable to face the delay. To look at the picture for five minutes would be enough–it would clear up certain questions which hummed in his brain; so that the next morning, to give himself this luxury, he took the train for London. He sent no word in advance; he would lunch at his club and probably return into Sussex by the 5.45.

In St. John’s Wood the tide of human life flows at no time very fast, and in the first days of September Lyon found unmitigated emptiness in the straight sunny roads where the little plastered garden-walls, with their incommunicative doors, looked slightly Oriental. There was definite stillness in his own house, to which he admitted himself by his pass-key, having a theory that it was well sometimes to take servants unprepared. The good woman who was mainly in charge and who cumulated the functions of cook and housekeeper was, however, quickly summoned by his step, and (he cultivated frankness of intercourse with his domestics) received him without the confusion of surprise. He told her that she needn’t mind the place being not quite straight, he had only come up for a few hours–he should be busy in the studio. To this she replied that he was just in time to see a lady and a gentleman who were there at the moment–they had arrived five minutes before. She had told them he was away from home but they said it was all right; they only wanted to look at a picture and would be very careful of everything. ‘I hope it is all right, sir,’ the housekeeper concluded. ‘The gentleman says he’s a sitter and he gave me his name–rather an odd name; I think it’s military. The lady’s a very fine lady, sir; at any rate there they are.’