The young man, thus brooding, lost himself in the alluring and perplexing alternatives of his plan. The particular way of dealing with a man’s art depended, of course, so much on its relation to his private life, and on the chance of a real insight into that. Fingall’s life had been obdurately closed and aloof; would it be his widow’s wish that it should remain so? Or would she understand that any serious attempt to analyse so complex and individual an art must be preceded by a reverent scrutiny of the artist’s personality? Would she, above all, understand how reverent French’s scrutiny would be, and consent, for the sake of her husband’s glory, to guide and enlighten it? Her attitude, of course, as he was nervously aware, would greatly depend on his: on his finding the right words and the convincing tone. He could almost have prayed for guidance, for some supernatural light on what to say to her! It was late that night when, turning from his open window above the throbbing city, he murmured to himself: “I wonder what on earth we shall begin by saying to each other?” Her sitting-room at the Nouveau Luxe was empty when he was shown into it the next day, though a friendly note had assured him that she would be in by five. But he was not sorry she was late, for the room had its secrets to reveal. The most conspicuous of these was a large photograph of a handsome young man, in a frame which French instantly recognized as the mate of the one he had noticed on Mrs. Morland’s writing-table. Well—it was natural, and rather charming, that the happy couple should choose the same frame for each other’s portraits, and there was nothing offensive to Fingall’s memory in the fact of Donald Paul’s picture being the most prominent object in his wife’s drawing-room. Only—if this were indeed Donald Paul, where had French seen him already? He was still questioning the lines of the pleasant oft-repeated face when his answer entered the room in the shape of a splendidly draped and feathered lady. “I’m so sorry! The dressmakers are _such_ beasts—they’ve been sticking pins in me ever since two o’clock.” She held out her hand with a click of bracelets slipping down to the slim wrist. “Donald! Do come—it’s Mr. French,” she called back over her shoulder; and the gentleman of the photograph came in after her. The three stood looking at each other for an interval deeply momentous to French, obviously less stirring to his hosts; then Donald Paul said, in a fresh voice a good deal younger than his ingenuous middle-aged face: “We’ve met somewhere before, surely. Wasn’t it the other day at Brighton—at the Metropole?” His wife looked at him and smiled, wrinkling her perfect brows a little in the effort to help his memory. “We go to so many hotels! _I_ think it was at the Regina at Harrogate.” She appealed to their visitor for corroboration.