Frank, I am sorry to say, felt an evil pleasure in the shock he had given her. He had spoken without malice aforethought, but the malice certainly came in when he had finished speaking. What right had this verse-idyl woman to tell him what a portrait should be, to speak to him of that which he hardly dared think of himself, and drag his nightmare out on to the table-cloth? His voice rose a tone as he went on. "You call one thing pretty, another ugly," he said. "Believe me, Art knows no such terms. A thing is true or it is false, and the cruelty of it is that if we have as much as a grain of falsehood in our whole sense of truth, the thing is worthless. Therefore, in this picture I am doing I have tried to be absolutely truthful; as you said at dinner, I have tried to paint what I am without extenuation or concealment. Would you like to see it? You would probably call it a hideous caricature, because in this terribly cruel human life no man knows what is good in him, but only what is bad. It is those who love us only who know if there is any good in us--" His voice sank again, and as his eye rested on Margery the hardness softened from his face and it was transformed. "Dear me, I have been talking a lot of shop, I am afraid," he said; "but I have the privilege or the misfortune--I hardly know which--to be terribly in earnest, and I have committed the unpardonable breach of manners to make you the unwilling recipient of my earnestness. Ah, Margery is going to sing to us." Poor Mrs. Greenock felt as if she had asked for a little bread and been pelted with quartern loaves. She felt almost too sore and knocked about to eat it herself, much less to put pieces in her pocket for Tom and Harry and Jane. But the fact that Margery was singing made it natural for her to be silent, and she finished putting on her gloves, and, so to speak, tidied herself up again. In fact, before they left she had recovered enough to be able to thank Frank for the extremely interesting conversation they had had, and to remind him of his promise to show her the picture. "I will send you a note when it is done," said he. "Margery is going away to-morrow for the inside of two days, and I expect it will be finished in three or four days at the most." CHAPTER VI Margery left early next morning, since, by the ingenious and tortuous route pursued by the Cornish lines, it was a day's journey from Penalva to the Lizard. Frank drove with her to the station, and promised to do as he was told, and not work more than seven hours a day and not less than four. He had quite recovered his equanimity, and spoke of the portrait without fear or despair. But when they got in sight of the station, and again when a puff of white steam and a thin, shrill whistle came to them as they stood on the platform, through the blue-white morning mist, a terror came and looked him in the face, and he clung to Margery like a frightened child.