He had not been near her for two months. It was barely five minutes' walk from his house in Bedford Square to her rooms in Montagu Street, and last year he used to go to see her every week. He did not need the reminder of her letter, for he had been acutely aware, through the term that separated them, of the date when he had last seen her. Still, he was not sure how much longer he might have kept away if it had not been for the note that told him in two lines that she had been ill, and that she had--at last--something to show him. He smiled at the childlike secrecy of the announcement. She had something to show him. Her illness, then, had not impaired her gift, her charming, inimitable gift. If she had something to show him he would have to go to her. He let his eyes rest a moment on her signature as if he saw it for the first time, as if it renewed for him the pleasing impression of her personality. After all, she was Freda Farrar, the only woman with a style and an imagination worth considering; and he--well, he was Wilton Caldecott. He would go over and see her now. He had an hour to spare before dinner. It was her hour, between the lamplight and the clear April day, when he was always sure of finding her at home. He found her sitting in her deep chair by the hearth, her long, slender back bent forward to the fire, her hands glowing like thin vessels for the flame. Her face was turned toward him as he came in. Its small childlike oval showed sharp and white under her heavy wreath of hair--the face of a delicate Virgin of the Annunciation, a Musa Dolorosa, a terrified dryad of the plane-trees (Freda's face had always inspired him with fantastic images); a dryad in exile, banished with her plane-tree to the undelightful town. She did not conceal from him her joyous certainty that he would come. She made no comment on his absence. It was one of her many agreeable qualities that she never made comments, never put forth even the shyest and most shadowy claim. She took him up where she had left him, or, rather, where he had left her, and he gathered that she had filled the interval happily enough with the practice of her incomparable art. The first thing she did now was to exhibit her latest acquisitions, her beautiful new reading-lamp, the two preposterous cushions that supported and obliterated her; while he saw (preposterous Freda, who had not a shilling beyond what the gift brought her) that she had on a new gown. "I say," he exclaimed, "I say, what next?" And they looked at each other and laughed. He liked the spirit in which Freda now launched out into the strange ocean of expenditure. It showed how he had helped her. He was the only influence which could have helped a talent so obscure, so uncertain, so shy.