"This new happiness is too overwhelming for fantastic talk." "Oh no it isn't," she declared in a whisper. "We have put back time thirteen years--we wipe out of our minds all that has happened in them, and start just where we left off. You were fantastic enough then, in all conscience." "I had the world at my feet and I kicked it about like a football." He hunched up his shoulders in a helpless gesture. "Somehow the football burst and became a helpless piece of leather." "I haven't the remotest idea what you mean," laughed Joanna. "Madame," said I, "if you turn your head about like that I shall get you all out of drawing." "Oh dear," said Joanna, resuming her pose. These were enchanted days, I think, for all of us. Even Cazalet felt the influence and put on a pair of gaudily striped socks over which his sandals would not fit. Joanna was very tender to him, as to everybody, but she appeared to draw her skirts around her on passing him by, as if he were a slug, which she did not love but could not harm for the world. Paragot, having for some absurd reason forsworn his porcelain pipe, smoked the cigarette of semi-contentment and fulfilled his happiness by the contemplation of Joanna and myself. I verily believe he was more at his ease when I was with them. As for the portrait, he viewed its progress with enthusiastic interest. Now and then he would forget himself and discourse expansively on its merits, to the delight of Joanna. He regarded it as his own production. Had he not bought this poor little devil and all his works for half-a-crown? Ergo, the work taking shape on the canvas was his, Paragot's. What could be more logical? And it was he who had given me my first lessons. No mother showing off a precocious brat to her gossips could have displayed more overweening pride. It was pathetic, and I loved him for it, and so did Joanna. The time came however--all too soon---when Madame de Verneuil could live in her Land of Cockaigne no longer. Convention claimed her. Her cousin, Major Walters, was coming from England to aid her in final arrangements with the lawyers, and he was to carry her off in a day or two to Melford. At the end of the last sitting she looked round the dismal place--it had discoloured, uneven, bulging whitewashed walls, an unutterably dirty loose plank floor, and a skylight patched with maps of hideous worlds on Mercator's projection, and was furnished with packing cases and grime and the sacking which was Cazalet's bed--and sighed wistfully, as if she had been an unoffending Eve thrust out of Eden. "I have been so happy here," she said to me. "I wonder whether I shall ever be so happy again! Do you think I shall?" I noticed her give a swift, sidelong glance--almost imperceptible--at Paragot, who had sauntered down the studio to look at one of Cazalet's pictures.