“I love you with all my heart, Louis.

“Valerie West.”

CHAPTER XIII

He never doubted that, when at length the time came for the great change—­though perhaps not until the last moment—­Valerie would consent to marry him.  Because, so far in his life of twenty-eight years, everything he had desired very much had come true—­everything he had really believed in and worked for, had happened as he foresaw it would, in spite of the doubts, the fears, the apprehensions that all creators of circumstances and makers of their own destiny experience.

Among his fellow-men he had forged a self-centred, confident way to the front; and had met there not ultimate achievement, but a young girl, Valerie West.  Through her, somehow, already was coming into his life and into his work that indefinite, elusive quality—­that something, the existence of which, until the last winter, he had never even admitted.  But it was coming; he first became conscious of it through his need of it; suspected its existence as astronomers suspect the presence of a star yet uncharted and unseen.  Suddenly it had appeared in his portrait of Valerie; and he knew that Querida had recognised it.

In his picture “A Bride,” the pale, mysterious glow of it suffused his canvas.  It was penetrating into his own veins, too, subtle, indefinable, yet always there now; and he was sensitive to its presence not only when absorbed in his work but, more or less in his daily life.

And it was playing tricks on him, too, as when one morning, absorbed by the eagerness of achievement, and midway in the happiness of his own work, suddenly and unbidden the memory of poor Annan came to him—­the boy’s patient, humorous face bravely confronting failure on the canvas, before him, from which Neville had turned away without a word, because he had no good word to say of it.

And Neville, scarcely appreciating the reason for any immediate self-sacrifice, nevertheless had laid aside his brushes as at some unheard command, and had gone straight to Annan’s studio.  And there he had spent the whole morning giving the discouraged boy all that was best in him of strength and wisdom and cheerful sympathy, until, by noon, an almost hopeless canvas was saved; and Annan, going with him to the door, said unsteadily, “Kelly, that is the kindest thing one man ever did for another, and I’ll never forget it.”

Yes, the something seemed to have penetrated to his own veins now; he felt its serene glow mounting when he spent solemn evenings in John Burleson’s room, the big sculptor lying in his morris-chair, sometimes irritable, sometimes morose, but always now wearing the vivid patch of colour on his flat and sunken cheeks.

Once John said:  “Why on earth do you waste a perfectly good afternoon dawdling in this place with me?”

And Neville, for a second, wondered, too; then he laughed: