It was, Conkling had to admit, a striking enough face, with its long and narrow boniness and its high-bridged nose. But there was a promise of cruelty in the small mouth with its down-drawn corners, where the earlier lines of haughtiness had merged into a pursed-up network of little wrinkles. The eyes were deep-set and cold, of faded blue, with a touch of tragedy in the looseness of the skin-fold under the thin and high circling brows. It was not the sort of face to make Conkling feel altogether at ease. Yet it held him spellbound. It seemed to step from another century. He sat behind the fragile shelter of his easel, studying that face as it came to a stop before him, as it towered above him with a frown of interrogation on its flinty brows. “Might I make so bold as to inquire the nature of your visit here?” the woman demanded in a voice as austere and unconceding as her face. “The young lady said I might make a sketch of the garden,” he explained, exasperated by the meekness which had crept into his own voice. The scorn on the lean old face confronting him did not add to Conkling’s happiness. “Gentlemen were once in the habit of rising, as I remember it, when accosted by a lady.” “I’m sorry,” cried Conkling, nettling brick red as he rose to his feet with his hat in his hand. “I beg your pardon,” he murmured again as he essayed a jack-knife bow in which deference was not visibly shot through with mockery. “I presume you are a stranger in this neighborhood,” she said in an acridly condoning tone of voice. “You are quite correct in that presumption,” retorted Conkling, a little tired of being treated like an urchin caught in a cherry tree. “Otherwise you would have respected the long-established wishes of the owner of this garden,” concluded his enemy, with a glance at the No Trespassing sign. “Undoubtedly, if I’d known in time,” admitted the intruder. The woman in the half mittens shifted her position a little. “Since you paint, I suppose you are interested in paintings,” she suggested. Along that glacial frontier Conkling thought he detected certain surface meltings, certain vague trickles of surrendering austerities. “That is my business,” he admitted. “What is?” she demanded, not unaware of the impatience in his tone. “Paintings and old furniture and _objets d’art_ in general,” he told her. “That’s what I go about appraising and buying up for the New York expert who is foolish enough to trust such matters to my judgment.” She was plainly puzzled by his ironic note of levity. “Am I to accept this as an acknowledgment that you do not understand your own business?” she asked in her pointed, monitorial severity of tone. “To err is human,” he said as he folded up his camp stool. “And several times I’ve paid good money for mahogany that turned out to be dyed boxwood.” Her solemnity, however, was unshakable. “But in the matter of paintings,” she persisted. “You’ve had experience with them?”