At home again, Piers wrote to Olga, the greater part of the letter being occupied with an account of what had happened at Liverpool.  It was not a love-letter, yet differed in tone from those he had hitherto written her; he spoke with impatience of the circumstances which made it difficult for them to meet, and begged that it might not be long before he saw her again.  Olga’s reply came quickly; it was frankly intimate, with no suggestion of veiled feeling.  Her mother’s letters, she said, were in Dr. Derwent’s hands.  “I told him who had given them to me, and how you obtained them.  I doubt whether he will have anything to say to me about them, but that doesn’t matter; he knows the truth.”  As for their meeting, any Sunday afternoon he would find her at Miss Bonnicastle’s, in Great Portland Street.  “I wish I were living there again,” she added.  “My uncle is very kind, but I can’t feel at home here, and I hope I shall not stay very long.”

So, on the next Sunday, Piers wended his way to Great Portland Street.  Arriving about three o’clock, he found the artist of the posters sitting alone by her fire, legs crossed and cigarette in mouth.

“Ah, Mr. Otway!” she exclaimed, turning her head to see who entered in reply to her cry of “Don’t be afraid!” Without rising, she held a hand to him.  “I didn’t think I should ever see you here again.  How are you getting on?  Beastly afternoon—­come and warm your toes.”

The walls were hung with clever brutalities of the usual kind.  Piers glanced from them to Miss Bonnicastle, speculating curiously about her.  He had no active dislike for this young woman, and felt a certain respect for her talent, but he thought, as before, how impossible it would be ever to regard her as anything but an abnormality.  She was not ill-looking, but seemed to have no single characteristic of her sex which appealed to him.

“What do you think of that?” she asked abruptly, handing him an illustrated paper which had lain open on her lap.

The page she indicated was covered with some half-dozen small drawings, exhibiting scenes from a popular cafe in Paris, done with a good deal of vigour, and some skill in the seizing of facial types.

“Your work?” he asked.

“Mine?” she cried scoffingly.  “I could no more do that than swim the channel.  Look at the name, can’t you?”

He found it in a corner.

“Kite?  Our friend?”

“That’s the man.  He’s been looking up since he went to Paris.  Some things of his in a French paper had a lot of praise; nude figures—­ queer symbolical stuff, they say, but uncommonly well done.  I haven’t seen them; in London they’d be called indecent, the man said who was telling me about them.  Of course that’s rot.  He’ll be here in a few days, Olga says.”

“She hears from him?”

“It was a surprise letter; he addressed it to this shop, and I sent it on—­that’s only pot-boiling, of course.”  She snatched back the paper.  “But it’s good in its way—­don’t you think?”