And next day it seemed as though her prophecy had been fulfilled. Eric had gone out directly after breakfast with his easel, paints, and canvas. They had seen nothing of him the whole morning; he had not come back to lunch, and by tea-time there were still no signs of him. “I knew it,” said Mrs Abbot, “I knew it. We only had to take him away and put him in fresh surroundings; he was bound to respond to beauty, he only needed the sunshine.” As soon as she had finished her tea she set out to look for him, garrulous with excitement. “Now what do you think it will have been that moved him? I wonder if it was the bay. No, he was standing on the top of the hill and he looked down and saw the village lying there in the sunlight! You take my word for it, we shall find him on the hill!” But they did not find him on the hill, nor was he painting the bay nor the orange grove, and they sought him in vain on the skirts of their little orchard. At last they began to feel a little nervous and began to ask one another fretfully whether any harm could have come to him. They made inquiries of the natives, but learnt nothing, and it was not till almost dinnertime that a fisherman told them where he was. “The young artist? Yes, sir. I saw him early this morning go into that little broken hut on the edge of the shingle, and though I have been working here all day I haven’t seen him come out. He’s probably there still.” Mr and Mrs Abbot looked at each other askance. What could Eric want in that small dilapidated house that was slowly falling to pieces over the head of an old shrivelled woman and her daughter? At the thought of the daughter Mrs Abbot began to blush. What if the south wind and the sudden beauty had moved Eric to express himself in terms more personal than those of paint? Artists were notoriously immoral, and the islanders, she had always heard, unfortunately weak. She hurried on, her heart beating quickly, excited and perturbed. In a few moments, however, all her fears for the innocence of the gentle islander were banished. For there, at the back of the small hut, an old woman, black and shrivelled, was cooking her dinner over an iron stove. Her neck and arms were bare, and the red glow of the fire shone dimly on the damp flesh, the dying sunlight stealing in one long, broad band through a chink in the woodwork fell across her throat, cutting the curves of her hanging breasts into hard, sharp angles, and a few yards away Eric Walker was working at his canvas in a fine frenzy of inspiration. VIII What is beauty to one man is ugliness to another. There is a proverb “about one man’s meat”; but there is a chariness about applying it to literature. Writers like to believe that a criterion of criticism exists; that their work is definitely good, bad, or indifferent.