“You are up to your promised time, Miss Armitage!” he said, kindly—­“And you must have worked very hard.  I hope you’ll give yourself a good long rest now?”

She laughed, lightly.

“Oh, well!—­perhaps!” she answered—­“If I feel I can afford it!  I want to work while I’m young—­not to rest.  But I think Miss Leigh would like a change—­and if she does I’ll take her wherever she wishes to go.  She is so kind to me!—­I can never do enough for her!”

The publisher looked at her sweet, thoughtful face curiously.

“Do you never think of yourself?” he asked—­“Must you always plan some pleasure for others?”

She glanced at him in quick surprise.

“Why, of course!” she replied—­“Pleasure for others is the only pleasure possible to me.  I assure you I’m quite selfish!—­I’m greedy for the happiness of those I love—­and if they can’t or won’t be happy I’m perfectly miserable!”

He smiled,—­and when she left, escorted her himself out of his office to her brougham with a kind friendliness that touched her.

“You won’t let me call you a brilliant author,” he said, as he shook hands with her—­“Perhaps it will please you better if I say you are a true woman!”

Her eyes flashed up a bright gratitude,—­she waved her hand in parting—­as the brougham glided off.  And never to his dying day did that publisher and man of hard business detail forget the radiance of the face that smiled at him that afternoon,—­a face of light and youth and loveliness, as full of hope and faith as the face of a pictured angel kneeling at the feet of the Madonna with heaven’s own glory encircling it in gold.

The quick little motor-brougham seemed unusually slow-going that afternoon.  Innocent, with her full happy heart and young pulsing blood, grew impatient with its tardy progress, yet, as a matter of fact, it travelled along at its most rapid speed.  The well-known by-street near Holland Park was reached at last, and while the brougham went off to an accustomed retired corner chosen by the chauffeur to await her pleasure, she pushed open the gate of the small garden leading to the back entrance of Jocelyn’s studio—­a garden now looking rather damp and dreary, strewn as it was with wet masses of fallen leaves.  It was beginning to rain—­and she ran swiftly along the path to the familiar door which she opened with her private key.  Jocelyn was working at his easel—­he heard the turn of the lock and looked round.  She entered, smiling—­but he did not at once go and meet her.  He was finishing off some special touch of colour over which he bent with assiduous care,—­and she was far too unselfishly interested in his work to disturb him at what seemed to be an anxious moment.  So she waited.

Presently he spoke, with a certain irritability in his tone.

“Are you there?  I wish you would come forward where I can see you!”

She laughed—­a pretty rippling laugh of kindly amusement.