As a matter of fact, the omelette, as well as the rest of the dinner, turned out remarkably well. Dereham had entered Gorsthwaite with an uncomfortable feeling that he was here to be bored by a friend's wife, to make the best of a foolish job; but as the meal went on, and Kate, in her straightforward way, took up his tentative comments on men and matters, emphasizing points of view which were too simple ever to have occurred to him, he began to wonder. From wonder he passed to interest; he clean forgot the passivity which was his especial pride; he talked little, and listened much to the words he enticed by strategy from his hostess. Finally, he felt regretful when Kate left them to their smoke. "I begin to understand," observed Dereham, after he had silently worked his way through the half of a cigar. "What do you understand, you oracle?" "There you're off it, old fellow. Oracles never understand--they only pretend to. That is by the way, though. What I meant was, that you seem to be really established here." "Why, yes. I should be sorry to desert Gorsthwaite in favour of any place you could name." "I thought it was just a pose, you see; we all thought so. You're a different man altogether, Lomax, from the Ogilvie lap-dog I used to know. Suits you better, I think." "Dereham, will you let Mrs. Ogilvie alone? You have exacted penance enough for that folly already." "All right, my dear chap; I plead guilty. What I want to know, though, is, when are we to have another picture? Are you sinking into an animal pure and simple--a sort of superior hog, that eats and drinks, and fills in the between-times with sleep?" Griff, by way of answer, took Dereham up to the room he used as a studio. A large canvas stood on an easel in the middle of the floor. Dereham went close to the picture, to which the finishing touches had been put early that morning, and stood regarding it attentively. "Humph!" he dropped at length. "Same style as the two eccentric daubs that the elderly critics profess to think so much of. Gad, though, there's something in it! Why, bless my soul, the figure in the foreground is your wife!" Yes, Griff had struck a fine idea, undoubtedly. The background was a rush-fringed tarn, with a sweep of rust-coloured bracken on the right and a clump of heathery knolls on the left; in the foreground, standing on a peat-bed of brownish-black, was the figure of a woman, her eyes looking steadfastly out from the canvas, her body set to a careless strength of pose. One corner of the tarn, and the bracken to the right of it, were lit by the dying sun; the rest of the moorscape lay in brooding darkness. On the face of the woman was just that blending of light and sombre shade in which the moor-features themselves had been picked out. It was impossible to say which was the more alive, the woman or the lonely strip of heath; each seemed able to stand alone, yet each helped the other's strength.