“It might have to do with your lack of ceremony—­a few minutes ago,” she said, laughing at him.

“My—­what?”

“Lack of ceremony.  You called me Valerie.”

“You can easily revenge that presumption, you know.”

“I think I will—­Kelly.”

He smiled as he painted: 

“I don’t know why the devil they call me Kelly,” he mused.  “No episode that I ever heard of is responsible for that Milesian misnomer. Quand meme!  It sounds prettier from you than it ever did before.  I’d rather hear you call me Kelly than Caruso sing my name as Algernon.”

“Shall I really call you Kelly?”

“Sure thing!  Why not?”

“I don’t know.  You’re rather celebrated—­to have a girl call you Kelly.”

He puffed out his chest in pretence of pompous satisfaction: 

“True, child.  Good men are scarce—­but the good and great are too nearly extinct for such familiarity.  Call me Mr. Kelly.”

“I won’t.  You are only a big boy, anyway—­Louis Neville—­and sometimes I shall call you Kelly, and sometimes Louis, and very occasionally Mr. Neville.”

“All right,” he said, absently—­“only hold that distractingly ornamental head and those incomparable shoulders a trifle more steady, please—­rest solidly on the left leg—­let the right hip fall into its natural position—­that’s it.  Thank you.”

Holding the pose her eyes wandered from him and his canvas to the evening tinted clouds already edged with deeper gold.  Through the sheet of glass above she saw a shred of white fleece in mid-heaven turn to a pale pink.

“I wonder why you asked me to tea?” she mused.

“What?” He turned around to look at her.

“You never before asked me to do such a thing,” she said, candidly.  “You’re an absent-minded man, Mr. Neville.”

“It never occurred to me,” he retorted, amused.  “Tea is weak-minded.”

“It occurred to me.  That’s what part of my ‘thorough talk’ is to be about; your carelessness in noticing me except professionally.”

He continued working, rapidly now; and it seemed to her as though something—­a hint of the sombre—­had come into his face—­nothing definite—­but the smile was no longer there, and the brows were slightly knitted.

Later he glanced up impatiently at the sky:  the summer clouds wore a deeper rose and gold.

“We’d better have our foolish tea,” he said, abruptly, driving his brushes into a bowl of black soap and laying aside his palette for his servant to clean later.

For a while, not noticing her, he fussed about his canvas, using a knife here, a rag there, passing to and fro across the scaffolding, oblivious of the flight of time, until at length the waning light began to prophesy dusk, and he came to himself with a guilty start.

Below, in the studio, Valerie sat, fully dressed except for hat and gloves, head resting in the padded depths of an armchair, watching him in silence.