Until they were actually in the gallery. There she cut herself off from the group, and her quiet was no longer the center of their motion. Hugh knew, as he watched her walking slowly along the rows of canvases, or standing back for long minutes to brood on some particular painting, that she had utterly forgotten him and the other two, for her father’s companionship. He surmised that Ariel was not actually seeing paintings at all, neither thinking nor feeling in terms of art. For after all, what did she really know about the technique of painting, its history or its criticism! Joan had assured Hugh that Ariel knew and cared absolutely nothing, in spite of her long association with a great artist, and Hugh had no reason to disbelieve it. Besides, he remembered Gregory Clare himself saying in Bermuda that his daughter had inherited nothing of his gift or interest in art. He had never even tried to give her instruction in drawing. Even so, she could be enthralled now by these pictures, seen again after three months of separation. The sky in the pictures, Hugh imagined, was actual Bermuda sky to Ariel, and the sea, the ocean curling her own home beach. The light was dear as her life, home light. She stood, embraced by shore and sky and wave. And her own figure up there, dancing in light and shade,—what of that? It was the word of her father’s love for her. It was merely his voice saying with the easiness of complete sincerity, “my darling.” And in all the pictures around the walls the artist’s love echoed itself in the dancing figure. So Hugh dreamed, standing near the entrance door and himself neglecting the paintings to concentrate upon a girl of flesh and blood. It seemed odd to him that nobody in the crowds which were drifting even this early in the afternoon through the gallery recognized Ariel as the dancer of the pictures. Obviously nobody did. If she should take off her hat, though, if the May sunlight should fall on her pewtery hair, would they then see? Or was she so rapt away into companionship with her dead father and his imagination that she had attained a kind of invisibility, except for those who loved her? Glenn and Anne kept together in their tour of the walls. Before “Noon,” given the place of honor—the only painting on one whole expanse of wall at the farthest end of the gallery—they stopped the longest. “Think of this being in our attic, just lying there in cobwebs and dust, for the past five years!” Glenn muttered. “Hugh hasn’t a touch of taste, of course—he’s the typical Philistine if there ever was one—but it does seem as if even the Tired Business Man might have an uneasy feeling—a sense that there was something, even if he couldn’t grasp it, in the very presence of a thing like this!” “Oh, be careful!” Anne whispered, pinching his arm and, with apparent casualness but real concern, glancing around them to see if any one had overheard Glenn’s mutterings.