Of course Mr. Neale Crittenden, like every one else, was physically quite visible, and, like every one else, entirely hidden by this apparent visibility. What you saw of people's surfaces and what was really there were two very different matters--Marise had learned this axiom if no other. What she saw of the newcomer was quite startlingly, disturbingly attractive to her. All the more reason to draw back warily and look carefully before she took a step forward. When on seeing him for the first time in the morning, or coming on him unexpectedly towering up above the crowd in some narrow, dark Roman street, she felt the ridiculous impulse to run to meet him like a child, she told herself impatiently that it was due to mere physical elements--his health, the great strength which made itself felt in his quietest movements, and a certain expression of his deep-set eyes which might very well not have the slightest connection with his personality, which might be a mere trick of bone-structure, the way his eyes were set in his head perhaps. They chose the show priests for the great festivals at Lourdes for some such casual gifts of physical magnetism. No, there was nothing whatever to be known from surfaces, Marise told herself. The subject of the portrait was always really quite invisible behind the thick, thick screen of his physical presence. All that was safe to do was to watch the strokes by which one by one he himself painted his own portrait. Marise often told herself all this as she was hurrying down the corridor to be the first person in the breakfast room--the first, that is, after Mr. Crittenden, who was a very early riser. I To begin with there was the dashing outline sketch of the first two or three days when, in a few bold lines, he had seemed to set up the figure on the canvas; the rescue of the swallow; justice for the cat; that first walk and homesick talk about Ashley, and at the end those stammering words of his which had seemed to show--Oh, that had now turned unreal to Marise! He couldn't have said that--and meant it! Then the soiree, the impression of force and originality he had made on the people he had met there, her natural certainty that he must of course have calculated that impression in order to profit by it--and then--at this recollection, Marise always laughed silently at her own astonishment when he had called Donna Antonia "a bad-tempered, stupid old woman." Donna Antonia certainly was that, and every one knew it. But nobody else would dream of saying it out loud, any more than they would give their honest impression of the ritual of a secret society. II