By this time they had reached the easel and stood back of it in observation.

Blue, intensely blue, and thickly blue was the sky that Billy had lavished.  Green and rigid were the palms.  Purple was the palace.  Very black lay the shadows like planks across the orange road.

Miss Falconer looked as if she doubted her own eyes.  Hurriedly she unfolded her lorgnette.

“It—­it’s just blocked in,” said Billy, speaking with a peculiar diffidence.

“Quite so—­quite so,” murmured the lady, bending closer, as if fascinated.

Lady Claire said nothing.  Stealing a look at her, Billy saw that she was looking it instead.

Miss Falconer tried another angle.  The sight of that lorgnette had a stiffening effect upon Billy B. Hill.

“You get it?” he said pleasantly.  “You get the—­ah—­symphonic chord I’m striking?”

“Chord?” said Miss Falconer.  “Striking,” she murmured in a peculiar voice.

“It’s all in thirds, you see,” he continued.

“Thirds!” came the echo.

“Perhaps you’re of the old school?” he observed.

“Really—­I must be!” agreed the lady.

“Ah!” said Billy softly, commiseratingly.  He cocked his head at an angle opposite from the slant of the lorgnette and stared his own amazing canvas out of countenance.

“Then, of course,” he said, “this hardly conveys——­”

“What are you?” she demanded.  “Is this a—­a school?”

“I?” He seemed surprised that there could be any doubt about it.  “I am a Post-Cubist.”

Miss Falconer turned the lorgnette upon him.  “Oh, really,” she said vaguely.  “I fancy I’ve heard something of that—­you’re quite new and radical, aren’t you?”

“Oh, we’re old,” he said gently, “very, very old.  We have returned to Nature—­but not the nature of mere academicians.  We paint, not the world of the camera, but the world of the brain.  We paint, not the thing you think you see, but the way you think you see it—­its vibrations of your inner mentality.  To paint the apple ripening on the bough one should reproduce the gentle swelling of the maturing fruit in your perception....  Now, you see, I am not trying to reproduce the precise carving of that door; I do not fix the wavings of that palm.  I give you the cerebellic——­”

“Quite so,” said Miss Falconer, dropping her lorgnette and giving the canvas the fixity of her unobstructed gaze.  “It’s most interesting,” she said, a little faintly.  “Are there many of you?”

“I don’t know,” said Billy.  “We do not communicate with one another.  That always influences, you know, and it is better to work out thought alone.”

“I should think it would be.”  Something in her tone suggested that the inviolated solitude of the asylum suggested itself to her as a fitting spot.  “Well, we won’t interrupt you any longer.  You’ve been most interesting....  The sun is quite hot, isn’t it?” and with one long, lingering look at the picture, a look convinced against its will, she went her way toward the victoria.