“Kelly!”

“What?”

“I wish you a Happy New Year.”

“Thank you.  I wish you the same.”

“Come over here and curl up on the hearth and drop your head back on my knees, and tell me what is the trouble—­you sulky boy!”

He did not appear to hear her.

“Please?—­” with a slight rising inflection.

“What is the use of pretending?” he said, shortly.

“Pretending!” she repeated, mimicking him delightedly.  Then with a clear, frank laugh:  “Oh, you great, big infant!  The idea of you being the famous painter Louis Neville!  I wish there was a nursery here.  I’d place you in it and let you pout!”

“That’s more pretence,” he said, “and you know it.”

“What silly things you do say, Louis!  As though people could find life endurable if they did not pretend.  Of course I’m pretending.  And if a girl pretends hard enough it sometimes comes true.”

“What comes true?”

“Ah!—­you ask me too much....  Well, for example, if I pretend I don’t mind your ill-temper it may come true that you will be amiable to me before I go home.”

There was no smile from him, no response.  The warmth of the burning logs deepened the colour in her cold cheeks.  Snow crystals on her dark hair melted into iris-rayed drops.  She stretched her arms to the fire, and her eyes fell on Gladys and her kitten, slumbering, softly embraced.

“Oh, do look, Kelly!  How perfectly sweet and cunning!  Gladys has her front paws right around the kitten’s neck.”

Impulsively she knelt down, burying her face in the fluffy heap; the kitten partly opened its bluish eyes; the mother-cat stretched her legs, yawned, glanced up, and began to lick the kitten, purring loudly.

For a moment or two the girl caressed the drowsy cats, then, rising, she resumed her seat, sinking back deeply into the arm-chair and casting a sidelong and uncertain glance at Neville.

The flames burned steadily, noiselessly, now; nothing else stirred in the studio; there was no sound save the ghostly whisper of driving snow blotting the glass roof above.

Her gaze wandered over the silken disorder in the studio, arrested here and there as the firelight gleamed on bits of armour—­on polished corselet and helmet and the tall hilts of swords.  Then she looked upward where the high canvas loomed a vast expanse of gray, untouched except for the brushed-in outlines of men in shadowy processional.

She watched Neville, who had begun to prowl about in the disorder of the place, stepping over trailing velvets, avoiding manikins armed cap-a-pie, moving restlessly, aimlessly.  And her eyes followed his indecision with a smile that gradually became perplexed and then a little troubled.

For even in the uncertain firelight she was aware of the change in his face—­of features once boyish and familiar that seemed now to have settled into a sterner, darker mould—­a visage that was too lean for his age—­a face already haunted of shadows; a mature face—­the face of a man who had known unhappiness.