Querida sipped his coffee and glanced out of the club window.  From the window he could see the roof of the studio building where Neville lived.  And he wondered how far Valerie was from that building at the present moment, wondered, and sipped his coffee.

He was a man whose career had been builded upon perseverance.  He had begun life by slaying every doubt.  And his had been a bitter life; but he had suffered smilingly; the sordid struggle along the edges of starvation had hardened nothing of his heart.

Sensitive, sympathetic, ardent, proud, and ambitious with the quiet certainty of a man predestined, he had a woman’s capacity for patience, for suffering, and for concealment, but not for mercy.  And he cared passionately for love as he did for beauty—­had succumbed to both in spirit oftener than in the caprice of some inconsequential amourette.

But never, until he came to know Valerie West, had a living woman meant anything vital to his happiness.  Yet, what she aroused in him was that part of his nature to which he himself was a stranger—­a restless, sensuous side which her very isolation and exposure to danger seemed to excite the more until desire to control her, to drive others away, to subdue, master, mould her, make her his own, obsessed him.  And he had tried it and failed; and had drawn aside, fiercely, still watching and determined.

Some day he meant to marry properly.  He had never doubted his ability to do so even in the sordid days.  But there was no hurry, and life was young, and so was Valerie West—­young enough, beautiful enough to bridge the years with him until his ultimate destiny awaited him.

And all was going well again with him until that New-year’s night; and matters had gone ill with him since then—­so ill that he could not put the thought of it from him, and her beauty haunted him—­and the expression of Neville’s eyes!—­

But he remained silent, quiet, alert, watching and waiting with all his capacity for enduring.  And he had now something else to watch—­something that his sensitive intuition had divined in a single unfinished canvas of Neville’s.

So far there had been but one man supreme in the new world as a great painter of sunlight and of women.  There could not be two.  And he already felt the approach of a shadow menacing the glory of his sunlight—­already stood alert and fixedly observant of a young man who had painted something disquieting into an unfinished canvas.

That man and the young girl whom he had painted to the astonishment and inward disturbance of Jose Querida, were having no easy time in that new world which they had created for themselves.

Embarked upon an enterprise in the management of which they were neither in accord nor ever seemed likely to be, they had, so far, weathered the storms of misunderstandings and the stress of prejudice.  Blindly confident in Love, they were certain, so far, that it was Love itself that they worshipped no matter what rites and ceremonies each one observed in its adoration.  Yet each was always attempting to convert the other to the true faith; and there were days of trouble and of tears and of telephones.