“Valerie, dear, I could”—­he checked himself; thought for a while until the strain of his set teeth aroused him to consciousness of his own emotion.

Rather white he looked at her, searching for the best phrase—­for it was already threatening to be a matter of phrases now—­of forced smiles—­and some breathing spot fit for the leisure of self-examination.

“I’m going back to paint,” he said.  “Those commissions have waited long enough.”

He strove to visualise his studio, to summon up the calm routine of the old regime—­as though the colourless placidity of the past could steady him.

“Will you need me?” she asked.

“Later—­of course.  Just now I’ve a lot of men’s figures to deal with—­that symbolical affair for the new court house.”

“Then you don’t need me?”

“No.”

She thought a moment, slim fingers resting on the knob of her door, standing partly turned away from him.  Then, opening her door, she stepped inside, hesitated, looked back: 

“Good-bye, Louis, dear,” she said, gently.

CHAPTER VI

Neville had begun to see less and less of Valerie West.  When she first returned from the country in September she had come to the studio and had given him three or four mornings on the portrait which he had begun during the previous summer.  But the painting of it involved him in difficulties entirely foreign to him—­difficulties born of technical timidity of the increasing and inexplicable lack of self-confidence.  And deeply worried, he laid it aside, A dull, unreasoning anxiety possessed him.  Those who had given him commissions to execute were commencing to importune him for results.  He had never before disappointed any client.  Valerie could be of very little service to him in the big mural decorations which, almost in despair, he had abruptly started.  Here and there, in the imposing compositions designed for the Court House, a female figure, or group of figures, was required, but, in the main, male figures filled the preliminary cartoons—­great law-givers and law-defenders of all ages and all lands, in robes and gowns of silks; in armour, in skins, in velvet and ermine—­men wearing doublet, jack-coat, pourpoint; men in turban and caftan, men covered with mail of all kinds—­armour of leather, of fibre, of lacquer, of quilted silk, of linked steel, Milanaise, iron cuirass; the emblazoned panoply of the Mongol paladins; Timour Melek’s greaves of virgin gold; men of all nations and of all ages who fashioned or executed human law, from Moses to Caesar, from Mohammed to Genghis Kahn and the Golden Emperor, from Charlemagne to Napoleon, and down through those who made and upheld the laws in the Western world, beginning with Hiawatha, creator of the Iroquois Confederacy—­the Great League.