"How dreadfully lazy you are!" said Margery, inconsistently. "You'd never do anything if it wasn't for me. But you must promise to work very hard and sensibly to-morrow and next day, and when I come back I shall expect to see it more than half finished." "Sensibly!" said Frank, impatiently; "there is no such thing. All good work is done in a sort of madness or somnambulism--I don't know which. Everything worth doing is done by men possessed of demons." "The demon of crossness seems to have haunted you this morning," said Margery. "But you needn't make yourself crosser than is consistent with truth." "But supposing I can't paint it in any other way than what you saw this morning?" asked Frank. "What am I to do, then?" "There! Now you are asking my advice," said Margery, triumphantly, "although you always insist that I know nothing about art. Why, of course, you must paint it as you see it. You are forever saying that yourself." "Well, you won't like it," said Frank. "If you'll promise to eat your breakfast at nine and your lunch at two, and not work more than seven hours a day and go out not less than three, I will chance it. Mr. Armitage was so right when he said that good digestion was half the artistic sense." "And the other half is bad dreams," said Frank. "No; if you have good digestion, you don't have bad dreams." Frank walked on in silence. "If I only knew what was the matter with it," he said, at length, "I could correct it. But I don't, and I think it must be right. It's very odd." "It's not a bit odd; it's only because you didn't eat your breakfast. And now you've got to eat your lunch." Frank smoked a cigarette in his studio afterwards while Margery was getting ready. Soon he heard her calling, and got up to go. He stood for a moment in front of the portrait before leaving the room, and a momentary spasm of uncontrollable fear seized him. "My God!" he said, "she goes away to-morrow; and I--I shall be left alone with this!" CHAPTER V Frank got through his tennis-party without discredit. Margery's presence seemed to have exorcised--for the time being, at any rate--the demon which he said possessed him, and there was no apparent similarity between his nature and Mr. Fortescue's. Ease of manner and a certain picturesqueness were natural to him, and Margery found herself forgetting the slightly disturbing events of the last twenty-four hours.