That auto-intoxication had always left his mind and his eye steady and watchful, although drugged—­like the calm judgment of the intoxicated opportunist at the steering wheel of a racing motor.  And a race once run and ended, a deliberate consideration of results usually justified the pleasure of the pace.

Yet that mysterious something which some said he lacked, had not yet appeared.  That something, according to many, was an elusive quality born of a sympathy for human suffering—­an indefinable and delicate bond between the artist and his world—­between a master who has suffered, and all humanity who understands.

The world seemed to recognise this subtle bond between themselves and Querida’s pictures.  Yet in the pictures there was never any sadness.  Had Querida ever suffered?  Was it in that olive-skinned, soft-voiced young man to suffer?—­a man apparently all grace and unruffled surface and gentle charm—­a man whose placid brow remained smooth and untroubled by any line of perplexity or of sorrow.

And as Neville studied his own canvas coolly, logically, with an impersonal scrutiny that almost amounted to hostility, he wondered what it was in Querida’s work that still remained absent in his.  He felt its absence but he could not define what it was that was absent, could not discover the nature of it.  He really began to feel the lack of it in his work, but he searched his canvas and his own heart in vain for any vacuum unfilled.

[Illustration:  “He stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious something”]

Then, too, had he himself not suffered?  What had that restless, miserable winter meant, if it had not meant sorrow?  He had suffered—­blindly it is true until the truth of his love for Valerie had suddenly confronted him.  Yet that restless pain—­and the intense emotion of their awakening—­all the doubts, all the anxieties—­the wonder and happiness and sadness in the imminence of that strange future impending for them both—­had altered nothing in his work—­brought into it no new quality—­unless, as he thought, it had intensified to a dazzling brilliancy the same qualities which already had made his work famous.

“It’s all talk,” he said to himself—­“it’s sentimental jargon, precious twaddle—­all this mysterious babble about occult quality and humanity and sympathy.  If Jose Querida has the capacity of a chipmunk for mental agony, I’ve lost my bet that he hasn’t.”

And all the time he was conscious that there was something about Querida’s work which made that work great; and that it was not in his own work, and that his own work was not great, and never had been great.

“But it will be,” he said rather grimly to himself one day, turning with a shrug from his amazing canvas and pulling the unfinished portrait of Valerie into the cold north light.

For a long while he stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious something, and found none.