No one would guess that the inconspicuous girl on the arm of the inconspicuous, rather typical New York business man was the dancer of the pictures. Least of all would any one, now or ever, know that Hugh had given to the painter his first taste of practical appreciation in buying “Noon” for one thousand dollars. It would be delightful, masquerading with Ariel like this, sharing alone in all that crowd their secrets. For some reason his mother, Schwankovsky, Charlie Frye, even Joan herself, did not enter into this early morning daydream. But Hugh did not miss them. In fact, they would have spoiled the point, the reason of its creation, which was his isolation with Ariel in her first great happiness. He went up to the attic as soon as he had had his breakfast. Grandam and Ariel had been awake and dressed since the crack of dawn. Grandam was as stirred as Ariel about the significance of the day, and it occurred to Hugh that that was why she had wanted to keep Ariel with her until the last possible minute. She, too, had her daydream of sharing happiness with the dear girl. She was lying in her long chair at the edge of the almost too warm sunshine which fell through the open tall window. Ariel was just finishing turning the night bed into a daybed. She placed the last silver pillow as Hugh came in. “Noon” was gone from the mantel, but the whole room had taken on its atmosphere. It seemed that in vanishing it had left its very glamour and light behind. And it had left the dancer. She was there with a shallow dish of hepaticas in her hand, a dish that might have been a wide sea shell, reaching up to place it on the mantel. In an ivory silk blouse, opened at the throat, and a clinging green skirt, her hair a wave of light on her neck—and the identical light of the spring morning in her eyes and at the corners of her uptilted lips, she was the dancer glorified. Hugh had a swift sense as he entered that Ariel, Grandam and the room were all aswim in the clear light that was Gregory Clare’s imagination: that he was seeing them as they existed only in Gregory Clare’s heart, not in his, Hugh Weyman’s, dull life. For the moment he knew that his friend was not dead, that Ariel was still his care, and still moved through his imagination, the dancer. Almost jealously Hugh came forward, tried to enter and be where Ariel was, in that realm of imagination and light. And he did not entirely fail. For the few minutes he stayed in Grandam’s apartment the world was fresh and life was winged. There was a crush in the anteroom of the exhibition when Hugh and his mother arrived. Schwankovsky had promised them this would be so, and Hugh’s daydream had previsioned it. Although they had made a point of being ten minutes early, the room was already full of curious and eager men and women, and the three elevators in the hall of the building were steadily discharging more groups of crowding humanity to add to the discomfort.