“Oh, why not?”

“She is too obvious.  Anybody can paint a Persian carpet, but one can’t put soul into a—­carpet——­”

He was petulant.  “I shall never paint the pictures I want to paint.  Life is too short.”

“Life isn’t short.  Look at Grandfather.  You will have forty years yet in which to paint.”

And now it was he who changed the subject, quickly, as if he were afraid of it.

“My sister is coming to-morrow.  I rather think you will like her.”

“Will she like me, that’s more important.”

“She will love you, as I do, as everybody does, Becky.”

They had reached that point in ten days that he could say such things to her and win her smile.  She did not believe in the least that he loved her.  He always laughed when he said it.

She liked him very much.  She felt that the Admiral and Tristram and Archibald Cope were all of them the best of comrades.  Except for Jane, she had had practically no feminine society since she came.  And Jane was not especially inspiring, not like Tristram, who seemed to carry one’s imagination back to Viking days.

Cope was immensely enthusiastic about Tristram.  “If I could paint figures as I want to,” he said, “I’d do Tristram as ‘The Islander.’  One feels that he belongs here as inevitably as the moors or the sands or the sea.  Perhaps it is he who ought to be in bronze on the bluff, instead of the Indian.”

“But he’d have to face the sea,” said Becky.

“Yes,” Cope agreed, “he would.  He loves it and his ancestors lived by it.  I’ll stick to my Indian and the moor.”

Becky gathered up her letters.  “It is time for lunch, and Jane doesn’t like to be kept waiting.  Won’t you lunch with us?  Grandfather will be delighted.”

“I shall get to be a perpetual guest.  I feel as if I were taking advantage of your hospitality.”

“We shouldn’t ask you if we didn’t want you.”

“Then I’ll come.”

They walked up the beach together.  Becky was muffled in her red cape, Cope had a sweater under his coat.  The air was sharp and clear as crystal.

“How anybody can go in bathing in this weather,” Becky shivered, as a woman ran down the sands towards the sea.  She cast off her bathing cloak and stood revealed, slim and rather startling, in yellow.

“She goes in every day,” said Cope, “even when it storms.”

“Who is she?”

“A dancer—­from New York.  Haven’t you seen her before?”

“No.  Where is she staying?”

“At the hotel.”

“I thought the hotel was closed.”

“Not for three weeks.  There aren’t many guests.  This one came up a month ago.  She dances on the moor—­practising for some play which opens in October.”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.  They call her ‘The Yellow Daffodil’ because of that bathing suit.”

The girl was swimming now beyond the breakers.