Just why this was held against them Conkling could not quite define, just as he could not actively share in the rural indignation against Kendal Keswick’s fifteen-year-old crime of importing a figure model from New York. A justice of the peace had taken a hand in that affair and there had been high words in the attic studio of the old manor-house, where the model had been ordered in the name of the law to put on her clothes and take her departure by the first train to the States. And Kendal Keswick, after roundly cursing the country, had also taken his departure. That eccentric dilettante went morosely off to Italy, for a chance, as he put it, to breathe again. But there, ironically enough, he breathed his last before the end of the year. All this, piled up before Conkling in a garrulous campaign of discouragement, only added a razor edge to that cool-eyed connoisseur’s determination to revisit the Keswick manor-house. There was, he kept reminding himself, every reason to assume that this old house might be rich in the things he was most eager to obtain. But that purely antiquarian curiosity became perplexingly involved with the memory of an intense-eyed girl with mahogany-tinted hair. So two days later, when he parked his car in the deep shadow of a horse-chestnut beside the Lake Road, he felt that luck was with him when he caught sight of a lilac sunbonnet on the far side of the half-strangled cedar hedge. Yet his heart skipped a beat as he pushed open the broken gate, and in stepping through it seemed to step back a century in time. The girl, who had a garden rake in her hand, paled a little as she caught sight of him. “It was good of you to come back,” she said quite simply. But that acknowledgment seemed enriched by the look of intensity on her face. It was a look, he was beginning to see, which was habitual with her, and had much to do with her persistent aura of childishness. “I call it good of you to let me,” he protested. Yet his eyes, as he spoke, were on the faded front of the old manor-house. “_They_ didn’t understand,” she said with her childlike immediacy. “Understand what?” he asked. “That you were an artist,” she explained. “But I’m not. I’m only a curio hound for a kindly old gentleman named Banning, who gives me a car and pays me money for wandering about and enjoying life.” “But you paint,” she reminded him. Conkling could afford to laugh at her solemnity. “I thought I could paint once, but two years in Paris showed me I was barking up the wrong tree. About all I’m good for now is to size up other people’s painting.” The girl’s gaze became impersonal. “_They_ found that out,” she admitted. “Who did?” “My aunts; and they’re rather sorry now about Nero.”