* * * * *

  And then he thinks he knows
  The hills where his life rose
  And the sea whereunto it goes.”

Some such Indian summer of delight and forgetfulness of trouble, and the tragic condition of our days, was now opening to Harold Quaritch and Ida de la Molle.  Every day, or almost every day, they met and went upon their painting expeditions and argued the point of the validity or otherwise of the impressionist doctrines of art.  Not that of all this painting came anything very wonderful, although in the evening the Colonel would take out his canvases and contemplate their rigid proportions with singular pride and satisfaction.  It was a little weakness of his to think that he could paint, and one of which he was somewhat tenacious.  Like many another man he could do a number of things exceedingly well and one thing very badly, and yet had more faith in that bad thing than in all the good.

But, strange to say, although he affected to believe so firmly in his own style of art and hold Ida’s in such cheap regard, it was a little painting of the latter’s that he valued most, and which was oftenest put upon his easel for purposes of solitary admiration.  It was one of those very impressionist productions that faded away in the distance, and full of soft grey tints, such as his soul loathed.  There was a tree with a blot of brown colour on it, and altogether (though as a matter of fact a clever thing enough) from his point of view of art it was utterly “anathema.”  This little picture in oils faintly shadowed out himself sitting at his easel, working in the soft grey of the autumn evening, and Ida had painted it and given it to him, and that was why he admired it so much.  For to speak the truth, our friend the Colonel was going, going fast—­sinking out of sight of his former self into the depths of the love that possessed his soul.

He was a very simple and pure-minded man.  Strange as it may appear, since that first unhappy business of his youth, of which he had never been heard to speak, no living woman had been anything to him.  Therefore, instead of becoming further vulgarised and hardened by association with all the odds and ends of womankind that a man travelling about the globe comes into contact with, generally not greatly to his improvement, his faith had found time to grow up stronger even than at first.  Once more he looked upon woman as a young man looks before he has had bitter experience of the world—­as a being to be venerated and almost worshipped, as something better, brighter, purer than himself, hardly to be won, and when won to be worn like a jewel prized at once for value and for beauty.

Now this is a dangerous state of mind for a man of three or four and forty to fall into, because it is a soft state, and this is a world in which the softest are apt to get the worst of it.  At four and forty a man, of course, should be hard enough to get the better of other people, as indeed he generally is.