"You musn't see it till it's done!" he cried. "Just turn your back, there's a good chap, till I put it with its face to the wall. I had no idea till I looked at it to-day how nearly it is finished. I do wish Miss Ellington could have come this afternoon instead of you--which sounds polite, but isn't--and I really think I might have made it the last sitting. That sounds polite too. By the way, what an ass I am; I never made another appointment with her last night!" This was all sufficiently frank, for Evelyn had managed, with the healthy optimism of which she had so much, to reason himself out of his fantastic forebodings of the evening before. It was left, therefore, for Philip, a task which was not at all to his taste, to put them all neatly back again. "I really doubt if she could have given you an appointment off-hand," he said, still fencing a little. "She is really so frightfully busy I hardly set eyes on her. Apparently, when you are to be married, you have to buy as many things as if you were going to live on a desert island for the rest of your life." Evelyn checked for a moment at this; the healthy optimism weakened a little. "I must write and ask her," he said, "or go and try to find her in. I must have the sitting soon; the thing won't be half so good if I have to wait. It is all ready; it just wants her for an hour or two." Philip was conscious of a most heartfelt wish that Madge had not entrusted him with this errand, and he cudgelled his head to think how least offensively to perform it. Then Madge's own suggestion came to his aid. "I wish you would let me see it," he said. "Pray do; I really mean it." Evelyn hesitated; though he had been so peremptory in its removal before, the impulse, he knew, was rather childish, it being but the desire to let the finished thing be the first thing seen. Yet, on the other hand, he so intensely believed in the portrait himself that he now felt disinclined to defer the pleasure of showing it. "Well, you mustn't criticise at all," he said, "not one word of that, or I may begin to take your criticism into consideration, and I want to do this just exactly as I see it, not as anybody else does. Do you promise?" "Certainly." "Very well; stand back about three yards--three yards is about its focus. Now!" He turned the easel back into the room again, where it stood fronting Philip. And the latter did not want to criticise at all; he felt not the smallest temptation to do so. Indeed, it was idle to do so; the picture was Madge, Madge seen by an unerring eye and recorded by an unerring brush. It stood altogether away from criticism; a man might conceivably reject the whole of it, if he happened not to care about Evelyn's art, but he could not reject a part. As Evelyn had said to Merivale, he had put there what he meant to put there, but nothing that he did not. It was brilliant, superb, a master-work. Philip looked at it a long minute in silence. "It is your best," he said. Evelyn laughed.