Evelyn arrived here soon after six, and found himself in undisturbed possession. Mr. Merivale, so said his servant, had gone off soon after breakfast that morning and had not yet returned. His guest, however, had been expected, and he himself would be sure to be in before long. Indeed in a few minutes his cry of welcome to Evelyn sounded from the lower end of the garden, and he left his long chair in the verandah and went down through the pergola to meet him. "Ah, my dear fellow," said Tom, "it is delightful to see you. You have come from London, have you not, where there are so many people and so few things. I have been thinking about London, and you have no idea how remote it seems. And how is the picture getting on--Miss Ellington's, I mean?" Evelyn looked at him with his direct, luminous gaze. Though he had come down here with the object of telling his friend what had happened, he found that at this first moment of meeting him, he was incapable of making his tongue go on its errand. "Ah, the portrait," he said; "it really is getting on well. Up to this morning, at any rate, I have put there what I have meant to put there, and, which is rarer with me, I have not put there anything which I did not mean. Do you see how vastly more important that is?" The Hermit had passed his day in the open merely in shirt and trousers, but his coat was lying in a hammock slung between two pillars of the pergola, and he put it on. "Why, of course," he said, "a thing which ought not to be there poisons the rest; anything put in which should be left out sets the whole thing jarring. That's exactly why I left the world you live in. There was so much that shouldn't have been there, from my point of view at least." Evelyn laughed. "But if we all left out all that each of us thinks shouldn't be there, there would be precious little left in the world," he said. "For instance, I should leave out Lady Ellington without the slightest question." He paused a moment. "And when the portrait is finished she, no doubt, would leave out me," he added, with charming candour. "Quite so," said Merivale; "and since I, not being an uncontrolled despot, could not 'leave out' people, which I suppose is a soft way of saying terminate their existence, I went away instead to a place where they were naturally left out, where for me their existence was terminated. It is all part of the simplifying process." They had established themselves in the verandah again, where a silent-footed man was laying the table for dinner; and it struck Evelyn for the moment as an inconsistency that the tablecloth should be so fine and the silver so resplendent. "But in your simplification," said Evelyn, indicating the table, "you don't leave out that sort of thing."