Some of his younger friends came also. One would have said that half the American Camouflage trooped in; little Robert, so strangely saved that black night at Beaumetz-les-Cambrai; young Harry, born at the foot of Ascutney—smiling Harry the sculptor, beside whom he himself had stood unharmed, in the field by Reims, when a shell came, striking Harry to nothingness; and Anthony’s nephew too, that portrait-painter whom the papers had called brilliant-futured—debonair Charlie Anthony whom he himself, merely Captain Price, under orders, had unknowingly despatched to his doom. Maurice was used to that boy’s presence by now; the harsh realities of dreams had often brought them together. Such things could not be, and men remain dumb. All this and much more must be told in the miracle landscape he was creating; it would be dishonest, otherwise. In spirit, smiling Harry and his mates belonged to that scene. Even M. Monet admitted that without doubt there is also this point of view. Not one of those companions failed to understand why our painter had not blotted out Pietro’s Amouretta. Not one of them was surprised when all of a sudden he looked up from his own painting, to make sure that Pietro’s was right side up, and uninjured by contact with the easel; Maurice laughing to himself the while, and saying aloud, “I should worry!” The critics declared later that this canvas was Price’s masterpiece. They wrote of the monumental purple dignity of his mountain, the self-contained inwardness of his middle distance, the happy audacity of his flowery foreground. They might have found out, to be sure, just by looking, that the painting was on wood, not canvas! But they could not know how much of Reims and Beaumetz-les-Cambrai were playing hide-and-seek among the shadows of Maurice’s mind when he set down Ascutney in the mantle of the hour. They would have been startled out of a day’s omniscience had they been aware of everything that Pietro and Amouretta had contributed of their brave young substance to that smiling foreground. So excuse them, please, for whatever was wrong in their writings; they could not know, exactly, about Maurice; and after all, they made a very good guess. III