Repellier raised a deprecating hand, and laughed. "Well, you know what I mean. And that's why I'm glad you like him." "I hardly said that." "I mean all he wants is ballasting with a little of that business spirit which we call American push." "Thanks," she murmured. "But tell me about him." "Well, there isn't much to tell--at least not much that I know." "But you knew him abroad?" "Yes, I met him two years ago at Lady Meredith's--those were the Woodstock Merediths of Meredith Hall. I was doing a portrait of Connie Meredith--that's the 'C. M.' of the book--and he used to tramp over from Oxford now and then. His father was Sir Harry Hartley, who was killed in the Dunstable Hunt four or five years ago. Hartley himself was wasting his time about Oxford, unsettled, unsatisfied, impecunious, and unrecognized. As I said, I saw a good deal of him at the Merediths'. He was to have married the girl--it was she who gave me that volume--but she was always delicate. In fact, they had to pack her off to the south of England, and then to Italy. She died at Fiesole. On my way back from the Continent I ran across Hartley again, and asked him why he didn't try America." "And will he ever do anything--anything worth while, I mean?" She still held the thin, green volume of verse in her hand, almost contemptuously--suddenly depressed in spirits, she could not fathom why. "He has already done something worth while." "What is it?" "Small things, I mean, but of the right sort." "I never heard of him before," murmured the woman, closing the volume with a gentle little snap of finality. "But you will," said Repellier as his guest slowly drew on her white gloves and arranged her hair before his mirror as she passed. "You will," he repeated as he swung his easel around to the light, and opening a door on his left called his model in for what was to be a morning of work for both of them. CHAPTER IV THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN Leave not thy slumbering melodies To dream too long within thine eyes; Let not all time thy bosom hold Song in that overfragrant fold, Lest thou a tardy gleaner prove And thy reluctant hand but move The overgoldened sheaf, to find Thy tenderest touch can never bind These thoughts too long unharvested-- Lest on some byway stern be shed That golden, sad, ungarnered grain, When thou canst sow nor reap again. JOHN HARTLEY, "The Lost Voice." These souls of ours are like railway bridges--they can be reconstructed even when the trains of temptation and trial are creeping over them.--"The Silver Poppy."