The impression came, but the impression was summarily erased, for as he crossed the threshold, Max flew to him, his exuberance suddenly dead, the trepidation of the artist enveloping him again, chasing the blood from his cheeks.

“Oh, Ned!  Dear Ned!  If it is bad?” He caught and clung to Blake’s arm, restraining him forcibly.  “Do not look!  Wait one moment!  Just one little moment!”

Very gently Blake disengaged the clinging hands.  “What a child he is, after all!  He shuts himself away and works like a galley-slave and then, when the moment of justification comes—!  Nonsense, boy!  I’m not a critic.  Let me see!”

As in a dream, Max saw him walk round the easel and pause full in front of it; in an agony of apprehension, a quaking eagerness, he lived through the moment of silence; then at Blake’s first words the blood rushed singing to his ears.

“It’s extraordinary!  But who is it?”

“Extraordinary?  Extraordinary?” In a wild onset of emotion, Max caught but the one word.  “Does that mean good—­or does it mean bad?  Oh, mon cher, all that I have put into that picture!  Speak!  Speak!  Be cruel!  It is all wrong?  It is all bad?”

“Don’t be a fool!” said Blake, harshly.  “You know it’s good.  But who is it?  That’s what I’m asking you.  Who is it?”

Heedless, unstrung—­half laughing, half crying—­Max ran across the room.  “Oh, mon ami, how you terrified me—­I thought you had condemned it!”

But Blake’s eyes were for the picture; the portrait of a woman seated at a mirror—­a portrait in which the delicate reflected face looked out from its shadowing hair with a curious questioning intentness, a fascinating challenge at once elusive and vital.

“Who is it?”

He spoke low and with a deliberate purpose; and at his tone recklessness seized upon Max.

“A woman, mon ami!  Just a woman!” He stiffened his shoulders, threw up his head, like a child who would dare the universe.

“Yes, but what woman?” With amazing suddenness Blake swung round and fixed a searching glance upon him.  “She’s the living image of you—­but you with such a difference—­”

He stopped as swiftly as he had begun, and in the silence Max quailed under his glance.  Out of the unknown, fear assailed him; it seemed that under this mastering scrutiny his mask must drop from him, his very garments be rent.  In sudden panic his thought skimmed possibilities like a circling bird and lighted upon the first-found point of safety.

“She is my sister,” he said, in a voice that shook a little.  “She is my sister—­Maxine.”

Blake’s eyes still held his.

“But you never said you had a sister.”

Max seized upon his bravado, flinging it round him as a garment.

“Mon ami,” he cried, “we are not all as confiding as you!  Besides, it is not given to us all to possess five aunts, seven uncles, and twenty-four first cousins!  If I have but one sister, may I not guard her as a secret?”