“No, you didn’t,” returned Kendal as they laughed together.  “You said something about being like Cleopatra, a creature of infinite variety, didn’t you?  About having a great many disguises—­” absently.  “But—­”

Kendal fell into the absorbed silence of his work again, leaving the sentence unfinished.  He looked up at her with a long, close, almost intimate scrutiny, under which and his careless words she blushed hotly.

“Then I hope you have chosen my most becoming disguise,” she cried imperiously, jumping up.  “Now, if you please, I will see.”

She stood beside the canvas with her eyes upon his face, waiting for a sign from him.  He, feeling, without knowing definitely why, that a critical moment had come between them, rose and stepped back a pace or two, involuntarily pulling himself together to meet what she might say.  “Yes, you may look,” he said, seeing that she would not turn her head without his word; and waited.

Elfrida took three or four steps beyond the easel and faced it.  In the first instant of her gaze her face grew radiant.  “Ah,” she said softly, “how unconscionably you must hare flattered me!  I can’t be so pretty as that.”

A look of relief shot across Kendal’s face.  “I’m glad you like it,” he said briefly.  “It’s a capital pose.”

The first thing that could possibly be observed, about the portrait was its almost dramatic loveliness.  The head was turned a little, and the eyes regarded something distant, with a half wishful, half deprecating dreaminess.  The lips were plaintively courageous, and the line of the lifted chin and throat helped the pathetic eyes and annihilated the heaviness of the other features.  It was as if the face made an expressive effort to subdue a vitality which might otherwise have been aggressive; but while the full value of this effect of spiritual pose was caught and rendered, Kendal had done his work in a vibrant significant chord of color that strove for the personal force beneath it and brought it out.

Elfrida dropped into the nearest chair, clasped her knees in her hands, and bending forward, earnestly regarded the canvas with a silence that presently became perceptible.  It seemed to Kendal at first, as he stood talking to her of its technicalities, that she tested the worth of every stroke; then he became aware that she was otherwise occupied, and that she did not hear him.  He paused and stepped over to where, standing behind her chair, he shared her point of view.  Even the exaltation of his success did not prevent his impatient wonder why his relation with this girl must always be so uncomfortable.

Then as he stood in silence looking with her, it seemed that he saw with her, and the thing that he had done revealed itself to him for the first time fully, convincingly, with no appeal.  He looked at it with curious, painful interest, but without remorse, even in the knowledge that she saw it too, and suffered.  He realized exultingly that he had done better work than he thought —­he might repent later, but for the moment he could feel nothing but that.  As to the girl before him, she was simply the source and the reason of it—­he was particularly glad he had happened to come across her.