CHAPTER XI

Valerie West was twenty-two years old in February.  One year of life lay behind her; her future stretched away into sunlit infinity.

Neville attained his twenty-eighth year in March.  Years still lay before him, a few lay behind him; but in a single month he had waded so swiftly forward through the sea of life that the shallows were already passed, the last shoal was deepening rapidly.  Only immeasurable and menacing depths remained between him and the horizon—­that pale, dead line dividing the noonday of to-day from the phantom suns of blank eternity.

It was that winter that he began the picture destined to fix definitely his position among the painters of his times—­began it humbly, yet somehow aware of what it was to be; afraid, for all his courage, yet conscious of something inevitable impending.  It was Destiny; and, instinctively, he arose to meet it.

He called the picture “A Bride.”  A sapphire sky fading to turquoise, in which great clouds crowded high in argent splendour—­a young girl naked of feet, her snowy body cinctured at the waist with straight and silvered folds, standing amid a riot of wild flowers, head slightly dropped back, white arms inert, pendant.  And in her eyes’ deep velvet depths the mystery of the Annunciation.

All of humanity and of maturity—­of adolescence and of divinity was in that face; in the exquisitely sensitive wisdom of the woman’s eyes, in the full sweet innocence of the childish mouth—­in the smooth little hands so unsoiled, so pure—­in the nun-like pallor and slender beauty of the throat.

[Illustration:  “‘Where do you keep those pretty models, Louis?’ he demanded.”]

Whatever had been his inspiration—­whether spiritual conviction, or the physical beauty of Valerie, neither he nor she considered very deeply.  But that he was embodying and creating something of the existence of which neither he nor she had been aware a month ago, was awaking something within them that had never before stirred or given sign of life.

Since the last section of the mural decoration for the new court house had been shipped to its destination, he had busied himself on two canvases, a portrait of his sister in furs, and the portrait of Valerie.

Lily Collis came in the mornings twice a week to sit for her; and once or twice Stephanie Swift came with her; also Sandy Cameron, ruddy, bald, jovial, scoffing, and insatiably curious.

“Where do you keep all those pretty models, Louis?” he demanded, prying aside the tapestry with the crook of his walking stick, and peeping behind furniture and hangings and big piles of canvases.  “Be a sport and introduce us; Stephanie wants to see a few as well as I do.”

Neville shrugged and went on painting, which exasperated Cameron.