“Shall we dine together here, Rita?”

“If you care to have me.”

“Yes, I do.”

He laid aside his palette, rang up the kitchen, gave his order, and slowly returned to where Rita was seated.

Dinner was rather a silent affair.  They touched briefly and formally on Querida and his ripening talent prematurely annihilated; they spoke of men they knew who were to come after him—­a long, long way after him.

“I don’t know who is to take his place,” mused Neville over his claret.

“You.”

“Not his place, Rita.  He thought so; but that place must remain his.”

“Perhaps.  But you are carving out your own niche in a higher tier.  You are already beginning to do it; and yesterday his niche was the higher....  Yet, after all—­after all—­”

[Illustration:  “Then Rita came silently on sandalled feet to stand behind him and look at what he had done.”]

He nodded.  “Yes,” he said, “what does it matter to him, now?  A man carves out his resting place as you say, but he carves it out in vain.  Those who come after him will either place him in his proper sepulchre ... or utterly neglect him....  And neglect or transfer will cause him neither happiness nor pain....  Both are ended for Querida;—­let men exalt him above all, or bury him and his work out of sight—­what does he care about it now?  He has had all that life held for him, and what another life may promise him no man can know.  All reward for labour is here, Rita; and the reward lasts only while the pleasure in labour lasts.  Creative work—­even if well done—­loses its savour when it is finished.  Happiness in it ends with the final touch.  It is like a dead thing to him who created it; men’s praise or blame makes little impression; and the aftertaste of both is either bitter or flat and lasts but a moment.”

“Are you a little morbid, Kelly?”

“Am I?”

“It seems to me so.”

“And you, Rita?”

She shook her pretty head in silence.

After a while Gladys jumped up into her lap, and she lay back in her arm-chair smoothing the creature’s fur, and gazing absently into space.

“Kelly,” she said, “how many, many years ago it seems when you came up to Delaware County to see us.”

“It seems very long ago to me, too.”

She lifted her blue eyes: 

“May I speak plainly?  I have known you a long while.  There is only one man I like better.  But there is no woman in the world whom I love as I love Valerie West....  May I speak plainly?”

“Yes.”

“Then—­be fair to her, Kelly.  Will you?”

“I will try.”

“Try very hard.  For after all it is a man’s world, and she doesn’t understand it.  Try to be fair to her, Kelly.  For—­whether or not the laws that govern the world are man-made and unjust—­they are, nevertheless, the only laws.  Few men can successfully fight them; no woman can—­yet....  I am not angering you, am I?”