Mrs. Dixon took the blow gallantly.

“Well, wasn’t I the finished fool to forget my specs!  I that couldn’t see the harp on a ha’penny without them!”

“Don’t worry, Dixie,” said Larry, smacking a ball into a pocket; “I’m not surprised you didn’t recognise it—­it’s not half good enough.”

“Master Larry, my dear,” returned Mrs. Dixon, whose social perceptions were more acute than her artistic ones, “I’ll go bail there isn’t one could take Miss Christian’s picture the way you could, you that was always her companion!” She moved away from the easel, and murmuring; “and, please God, always will be!” she rustled away down the long room.  Mrs. Dixon, indomitable Protestant though she was, did not share Evans’ opinion of Larry.

Larry threw down the cue and opened the high French window into the garden at the back of the house.

“Christian, for heaven’s sake come out!  I can’t stand this stinking room any longer!  I feel as if all the imbecilities that I’ve had to endure this afternoon were hanging in a cloud over the billiard table.  Come up to the old stone on the hill, and have some fresh air.”

He stepped out into the garden, and Christian followed him, smiling within herself at his impatience, the absurd impatience that she loved because it was his.  It wouldn’t be Larry if he suffered fools, or anything else that he disliked, gladly or peaceably.  The feeling that she was immeasurably older than he was was always at its most convincing when his painting was in question; even she could not quite realise what it meant to him to have rude hand laid upon the child of his soul.

The garden was dank and heavy with overgrown, dying things, as ill-cared-for gardens are wont to be at the end of September, but the tall bush of sweet-scented verbena, that grew by the door in the south wall, was still as green and sweet as in high summer.  Christian broke off some sprays and drew them through her hands before she put one into the front of her shirt.

“Here, Larry,” she said, giving him one, “this will help you to forget the billiard room!”

Larry gave her a long look as he took it; “I don’t altogether want to forget it,” he said.  “I daresay good old Dixie was a useful discipline.”

Had Christian heard Mrs. Dixon’s final aspiration she would have realised that with it Dixie had covered her failure as an art critic.

Outside the garden was a wide belt of fir trees, and beyond and above the trees, stretched the great hill, Cnochan an Ceoil Sidhe, the Hill of Fairy Music, that gave its name to the house and demesne.  Christian and Larry passed through the shadowy grove, walking side by side along the narrow track, their footsteps made noiseless by its thick covering of pine needles.  It was dark in the wood; the fir trees towered in gloom above them; here and there in the deep of the branches there was the stir of a wing, as a pigeon settled to its nest; from beyond the wood came a brief, shrill bicker of starlings; all things beside these were mute, and in the silent dusk, spirit was sensitive to spirit, and the air was tense with the unspoken word.