“Haven’t I? Come into the house and I’ll show you.” He followed her obediently and stood in the dark hall while she lighted the lamp in her studio. When he joined her she was running over a stack of canvases standing in a corner. “Do you see that?” she asked, slipping out one of the oil studies and giving it to him. It was a sketchy little painting of Long’s Peak, and it was punctured with numberless penknife stabs. “I did that one day when I was particularly savage,” she confessed; “just as you were when you smashed the gate. You don’t know how much good it does me to find out now and then that I haven’t a monopoly of all the bad temper in the world.” Antrim grinned. “Don’t lose any sleep on that score; you have lots of good company. I have been having a tough time of it all day, and the gate business was only the wind-up.” “Poor old martyr! And I have been sticking pins into it all evening! What has been the trouble? Or is it tellable?” “Everything and nothing. It has just been an off day with me all around. I have quarrelled with everybody I could get at, and with myself more than all. I need a balance-wheel worse than anything, Isabel, and it’s for you to say whether I shall have it or not.” He knelt to clear the smouldering fire in the grate, and then got up to walk back and forth in front of it. Isabel sat down and shaded her eyes from the light. Levity was on the tip of her tongue, but she felt that his mood was one in which ridicule would be as the spark to gunpowder. Therefore she met it fairly and tried to reason with him. “Must we go all over the old ground again, Harry?” she began. “Can’t I say something new and fresh--something that will make it clear to you that the worst possible thing that could happen to either of us would be this that you have set your heart upon?” “I don’t think you can,” he objected, pausing in front of the mantel to adjust a picture which was three hairs’ breadths out of plumb. “But you may try, if you care to.” But having leave to try, Isabel found that new sayings on a well-worn subject do not always suggest themselves on the spur of the moment, and she was obliged to leave the promise unfulfilled. “It would only be dressing the old things up in new clothes if I did,” she confessed, “and that wouldn’t bring us to any better understanding.” “It isn’t a question of understanding, Isabel; it is your ambition against my love--against reason, I had pretty nearly said. I don’t believe you love anybody else; and I--well, I’d be glad enough to take the chances of winning later on what you say you can’t give me now. That is the whole thing in a sentence, and it is for you to say whether I shall go away from here to-night the happiest of men or the most miserable.”