He examined all the other panels, but their shapes and sizes were not right. “Oh, well, I don’t give a damn,” lied Maurice to himself. He lit a cigarette, but the landscape came between him and his smoke. He picked up a frayed copy of “La Reine Margot,” but the landscape shut out Saint Bartholomew. He sat a moment in Anthony’s Venetian chair, and covered his eyes with his hands, but between his eyes and his hands he saw only the miracle landscape. So he rose resolutely, took up the panel of his choice, the Amouretta panel, and began to paint on its untouched side. A beautifully primed surface lent itself at once to the artist’s will. II “In the midst of death we are in life,” he murmured. Below, in the orchard, his wife was carolling old French songs with the children. “_On y danse, on y danse!_” Even Maury junior, a boy to the backbone, and little given to self-expression in song, especially foreign-language song, boomed out a mighty “_Tout en ronde!_” Half an hour before, Maurice senior had stood hand-in-hand with his wife, looking up into the flowery dome of a magnificent pear tree, all aglow with golden-white blossoms, all perfumed with their incense, and musical with legions of bees. He knew just where to find those magic boughs in his landscape; he recognized their golden-veiled whiteness, their garance rose. Left and right the spendthrift river was pouring out its silver in a royal progress, mile after mile in the May sunlight. Ascutney, the great mountain that all the people thereabouts knew as their tutelary deity, had chosen from his myriad mantles the one he might wear for an hour or so, of an entrancing blue to mock the heavens themselves. Smilingly yet warningly he confronted Maurice, singling him out from other persons, to tell him in a secret, consoling way, of the generations of men, those who had gone and those who were yet to come; yes, Ascutney spoke very seriously with Maurice, reminding him of everything, whatever it might be, that he, Maurice Price, in his great good fortune in art and life, owed to those generations, and must joyfully repay, by painting as best he might that lyric scene.