He had been in Bermuda that time for part of his Christmas holidays, along with his mother and young sister. But the mother and sister had never appeared on the Clares’ beach, never come with Hugh to the studio. Hugh’s own arrival there was the merest accident. One mid-morning he came pushing his rented bicycle across the fields to their beach, which he had glimpsed from a high spot on the road to St. George’s, intending a solitary swim in the shadow of their rocks. Only he did not know that they were their rocks or that there was a house at all, hidden away on the slope of purple cedars. He passed within a few yards of the studio, without sensing its presence, and went coolly down to the beach with the intention of undressing for his swim in the very seclusion where Gregory Clare was at the moment in the middle of painting a picture. The artist, hearing the careless approach to the sacred privacy of his working place, rose wrathfully to drive the intruder away. But it turned out that he did not resume his brushes and his palette again until he had joined the young man in a noon-hour swim in the emerald waters. For Hugh had succeeded in doing more that morning than blunder on to private property and interrupt the creation of a picture; he had blundered into a friendship with Gregory Clare, the artist, Ariel’s father. The sudden friend knew next to nothing about painting. That was evidenced by his awkward silences once he had come into the studio and stood looking with unconcealed bewilderment at the dozens of canvases stacked around the walls and against the chairs and tables. But the young man’s ignorance did not hinder Gregory Clare from talking art to him. He dragged forward the canvases, one after another, making rapid and brilliant criticisms of them himself in the face of Hugh’s blank silences, propounding exactly what it was that made each picture’s strength or weakness in its stab at beauty. And all the while Hugh looked from the artist to his paintings and listened, dark head slightly bent, but with a hawklike alertness in its poise that gave Clare, and even Ariel, watching, a sense of balanced keenness. Ariel and her father prepared the studio meals by turns, and this day of Hugh’s appearance happened to be Ariel’s day as cook. Hugh was more articulate about food, it soon transpired, than about art, and had intelligent praise for pungent soup and crisp salad. But though that was what he was at ease about and could speak of, his real interest was, Ariel saw, all in Gregory Clare and his rushing passionate talk concerning the paintings. He seemed scarcely conscious of Ariel, the lanky young girl in a faded green smock, with hair a pale wave on her shoulders, who had cooked the luncheon and soon so quietly cleared the table and then disappeared, dissolving, so far as he was concerned, perhaps, into the white, hot Bermuda afternoon. She knew that he was glad to be left alone with her wonderful father.