Kendal found the Cardiffs--there were only two, Janet and her father--at tea, and the Halifaxes there, four people he could always count on to be glad to see him. It was written candidly in Janet's face--she was a natural creature--as she asked him how he dared to be so unexpected. Lady Halifax cried out robustly from the sofa to know how many pictures he had brought back; and Miss Halifax, full of the timid enthusiasm of the well-brought-up elderly English girl, gave him a sallow but agreeable regard from under her ineffective black lace hat, and said what a surprise it was. When they had all finished, Lawrence Cardiff took his elbow off the mantelpiece, changed his cup into his other hand to shake hands, and said, with his quiet, clean-shaven smile, "So you're back!" "Daddy has been hoping you would be here soon," said Miss Cardiff. "He wants the support of your presence. He's been daring to enumerate 'Our Minor Artists' in the _Brown Quarterly_, and his position is perfectly terrible. Already he's had forty-one letters from friends, relatives, and picture-dealers suggesting names he has 'doubtless forgotten.' Poor daddy says he never knew them." "Has he mentioned me?" asked Kendal, sitting down squarely with his cup of tea. "He has not." "Then it's in the character of the uncomplaining left-over that I'm wanted, the modest person who waits until he's better. I refuse to act. I'll go over to the howling majority." "_You_ will never be a minor artist, Mr. Kendal," ventured Miss Halifax. "Certainly not. You will rise to greatness at a bound," said Lady Halifax, with substantial conviction and an illustrative wave of a fat well-gloved hand with a doubled-up fragment of bread and butter between the thumb and forefinger, "or we shall be much disappointed in you." "It's rapidly becoming a delicate compliment to have been left out," Mr. Cardiff remarked, with melancholy. "Some of those you've honored with your recognition are the maddest of all, aren't they, daddy, as we say in America! Dear old thing, you _are_ in a perilous case, and who is to take you round at the Private Views this year--that's the question of the hour! You needn't depend upon me. There won't be a soul on the line that you haven't either put in or left out!" "It was a fearful thing to write about," Kendal responded comfortably. "He deserves all the consequences. Let him go round alone." Under the surface of his thoughts was a pleased recognition of how little a fresh-colored English girl changes in three years. Looking at Miss Halifax's hat, it occurred to him that it was an agreeable thing not to be eternally "struck" by the apparel of women--so forcibly that he almost said it. "What have you been doing?" he asked Janet. "Wonders," Lady Halifax responded for her. "I can't think where she gets the energy or the brains--"