“Ah, there is my genius!  You must let me present him, Mademoiselle.  He will amuse you.  Hi, there!  Raoul!”

A young man, standing amid a group of workmen and criticising one of the panels between the curtains, turned sharply.  Almost before Dorothea was aware, he had doffed his paper cap and the General was introducing him.

She recognised him at once.  He was the young prisoner who had nailed the board against her brother’s apple-tree.

He bowed and began at once to apologise for the state of the room.  He had expected no visitors before Wednesday.  The General had played a surprise upon him.  And Miss Westcote, alas! was a critic, especially of classical subjects.

He had heard of her drawings for her brother’s book.

Dorothea blushed.

“Indeed I am no artist.  Please do not talk of those drawings.  If you only knew how much I am ashamed of them.  And besides, they were meant as diagrams to help the reader, not as illustrations.  But these are beautiful.”

He turned with a pleasant laugh.  She had already taken note of his voice, but his laugh was even more musical.

“Daphne pursued by Apollo,” he commenced, waving his hand towards the panel in face of her.  “Be pleased to observe the lady sinking into the bush; an effect which the ingenious painter has stolen from no less a masterpiece than the Buisson Ardent’ of Nicholas Froment.”

The General fumbled for the ribbon of his gold eye-glass.  M. Raoul moved towards the next panel, and Dorothea followed him.

“Perseus entering the Garden of the Hesperides.”

The painting, though slapdash, was astonishingly clever; and in this, as in other panels, no trace of the artist’s hurry appeared in the reposeful design.  Coiled about the foot of the tree, the dragon Ladon blinked an eye lazily at three maidens pacing hand in hand in the dance, over-hung with dark boughs and golden fruit.  Behind them Perseus, with naked sword, halted in admiration, half issuing from a thicket over which stretched a distant bright line of sea and white cliff.

“You like it?” he asked.  “But it is not quite finished yet, and Mademoiselle, if she is frank, will say that it wants something.”

His voice held a challenge.

“I am sure, sir, I could not guess, even if I possessed—­”

“A board, for example?”

“A board?”

She was completely puzzled.

He glanced at her sideways, turned to the panel, and with his forefingers traced the outline of a square upon it, against the tree.

“Restaurant pour les Aspirants,” he announced.

He said it quietly, over his shoulder.  The sudden challenge, her sudden discovery that he knew, made Dorothea gasp.  She had not the smallest notion how to answer him, or even what kind of answer he expected, and stood dumb, gazing at his back.  A workman, passing, apologised for having brushed her skirt with the step-ladder he carried.  She stammered some words of pardon.  And just then, to her relief, her brother Endymion’s voice rang out from the doorway: