"Well, I think my pictures bore me when they are done," he said, "though the opinion of other people never does. A picture is--is like a cold in the head. It possesses you while it is there, and you have to throw it off. And when it is thrown off, one never thinks of it again. At least, I don't." They had come to the end of the terrace, and the girl stopped as they turned. "And then you do another. Ah, how delightful to know that probably to the end of your life you will have things to do!" "I don't think you would say that if you had to do them," said he. "Yet, I don't know. Of course creating a thing is the biggest fun in the world. But how one tears one's hair over it!" Madge looked at his thick black thatch. "You seem to have got some left," she remarked. "Yes, but I'm looking thinner. Mrs. Home told me so. Oh, look at the moon! What a dreadful thing to say, too! But it really is out of drawing--it is far too big!" "Perhaps we are far too small," said she. Evelyn shook his head. "It is impossible to be small if that occurs to you," he said. They walked in silence after this for a dozen yards or so, Madge feeling, somehow, strangely attracted by her companion. There was nothing, it is true, particularly brilliant about his conversation; it was boyish rather than brilliant; but she felt, as most people did, that she was in the presence of a personality that was rather unusual. And this personality seemed to her to be very faithfully expressed in his pictures; there was something daringly simple about both him and them. He evidently said whatever came into his head, and her experience was that so many people only talked about such things as were supposed to be of interest. Also, in spite of this moonlight solitude, he evinced not the smallest tendency to notice the fact that she was a very good-looking girl; no hint of it appeared in his talk or his attitude to her. There was not the very slightest suspicion of that even in his desire to go on the river with her. That ridiculous suggestion she felt, with unerring instinct, had been made simply from comrade to comrade; there were two of them together, cut out from a table of bridge, and he had proposed it just as he might have proposed it to a man, instead of a girl, of his own age. And to Madge this was something of an exception in her experience of the other sex, for most unmarried men of her acquaintance had shown a tendency towards tenderness. Her beauty made it perhaps excusable in them, but she found it rather trying. It was a relief, at any rate, to find a young man who took her frankly, who could say "Look at the moon," only to point out that it was out of drawing. For in the matter of emotion Madge was strangely unfeeling, or, at any rate, strangely undeveloped; and if her mother had let any anxiety dwell upon her hard and polished mind, the doubts about Madge's future would, perhaps, have pressed as heavily there as any. As a good mother should,