'Angry? No, indeed. He has been so spoiled with his success that I don't wonder at your not liking him. As for me, you know, it is different. I knew Alec before his greatness became visible. No one, in the old days, ever suspected the wonderful powers he has developed. When he was a boy, no one knew that he could even hold a pencil, nobody suspected him of making rhymes--and now see what he has done. Yet, after all, his achievements seem to me only like incongruous additions stuck on to a central house. Alec and painting don't go together, in my mind. Nor Alec and vers de société. Nor Alec and story-telling. In his youth he passed for a practical lad, full of common-sense and without imagination.' 'Was he of a sensitive, highly nervous temperament?' 'Not to my knowledge. He has been always, and is still, I think, a man of a singularly calm and even cold temper--not in the least nervous nor particularly sensitive.' Armorel compared this estimate with that of her companion. Strange that two persons should disagree so widely in their estimate of a man. 'Then, three or four years ago, he suddenly blossomed out into a painter. He invited his friends to his chambers. He told us that he had a little surprise for us. And then he drew aside a curtain and disclosed the first picture he thought worthy of exhibition. It hangs on the wall above your head, Armorel, with its companion of the following year. My father bought them and gave them to me.' Armorel got up to look at them. 'Oh!' she cried. 'These are copies!' [Illustration: _'Oh!' she cried. 'These are copies!'_] 'Copies? No. They are Alec's own original pictures. What makes you think they are copies?' What made her think that they were copies was the very remarkable fact that both pictures represented scenes among the Scilly Isles: that in each of them was represented--herself--as a girl of fifteen or sixteen: that the sketches for both these pictures had been made in her own presence by the artist: that he was none other than Roland Lee: and that the picture she had seen in his studio was done by the same hand and in the same style as the two pictures before her. Of that she had no doubt. She had so trained her eye and hand that there could be no doubt at all of that fact. She stared, bewildered. Philippa, who was beside her looking at the pictures, went on talking without observing the sheer amazement in Armorel's eyes.