“A new note!” Kendal thought aloud.  “A voice crying in the wilderness, by Jove!  Wolff might have done it if it had been in French, but Wolff would have been fairer and more technical and less sympathetic.”

A fine energy crept all through him and burned at his finger-ends.  The desire to work seized him deliciously with the thrill of being understood, a longing to accomplish to the utmost of his limitations—­he must reasonably suppose his limitations.  Sometimes they were close and real; at this moment they were far off and vague, and almost dissolved by the force of his joyous intention.  He threw himself mentally upon half-finished canvas that stood against the wall in Bryanston Street, and spent ten exalted minutes in finishing it.  When it was done he found it ravishing, and raged because he could not decently leave for town before four o’clock next day.  He worked off the time before dinner by putting his things together, and the amiable people had never found him so delightful as he was that evening.  After amusing one of the robust young ladies for half an hour at prodigious cost, he found himself comparing their conversation with the talk he might have had in the time with Elfrida Bell, and a fresh sense of injury visited him at having been high-handedly debarred from that pleasure for so many weeks.  It staid with him and pricked him all the way to town next day.  He was a fool, he thought, to have missed the chance of meeting her upon the opening days of the London exhibitions; she was sure to have gone, if it were only to scoff, and her scoffing would have been so amusing to listen to.  He thought gloomily of the impossibility of finding her in London if she didn’t wish to be found, and he concluded that he really wanted to see her, that he must see her soon—­to show her that article.

The desire had not passed from him three days later, when the boy from below-stairs brought him up a card.  Kendal was in his shirt-sleeves, and had just established a relation of great intimacy with an entirely new subject.  Before the boy reached him he recognized with annoyance that it was a lady’s card, and he took it between his thumb and his palette with the most brutal impatience.  “You are to say—­” he began, and stopped.  “Show the lady up,” he said in substitution, while his face cleared with a puzzled amusement, and he looked at the card again.  It read “Miss Elfrida Bell,” but the odd thing was down in one corner, where ran the statement, in small square type, “The Illustrated Age.”

There was a sweet glory of May sunlight in the streets outside, and she seemed to bring some of it in with her, as well as the actual perfume of the bunch of violets which she wore in her belt.  Her eyes, under the queerest of hats, were bright and soft, there was a faint color in her cheeks.  Her shapely hands were in gray gloves with long gauntlets, and in one of them she carried a business-like little black notebook.