He bent and kissed her hair at her temple. Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck, kissed him passionately, her embrace tight; and a shower of tears rained upon his cheek. With a hysterical cry more like joy than like grief, yet like neither, she flung herself free, sprang into the canoe and pushed off. And she went her way and he his without either looking back. VII MR. RICHMOND CALLS Roger was working in the studio, with doors and windows wide. It was fiercely hot. He had reduced his costume to outing shirt and old flannel trousers--the kind they make in the Latin Quarter--baggy at the hips, tapering to a close fit at the ankles and hanging with a careless, comfortable, yet not ungraceful looseness. He was working at _the_ picture. He had not decided on a name for it. Should he call it April?--or Dawn?--or The Water Witch? Or should he give it its proper name--Rix? That title would mean nothing to anyone save himself. But to him the picture meant nothing else. True, there was landscape in it; the play of early morning light on foliage, on leaping water, on placid water made it the best landscape he had ever done--incomparably the best. The canoe, too, was a marvel in its way. But the girl--_there_ was the picture! He made another infinitesimal change--it would have been impossible to count the number of those changes he had made. Then he stood off at a little distance to look again. “Is it in the canvas--or is it in my mind?” said he aloud. He could not tell. He rather feared he was largely imagining the wonders he thought he saw in that pictured face and form. “It may be rotten, and I a fool hypnotized by her and by my own vanity, for all I know. But--what do I care? I am getting the pleasure.” Pleasure? Never before had he taken such deep, utter joy in his work. Not merely joy in the doing--that was his invariable experience--but joy in the completed work. Never before had he brought anything so near to the finish without a feeling of dissatisfaction, sense of failure, of having just missed his aim. He viewed the picture from a dozen points. And each time he beheld in it something new, something yet more wonderful. “I’m damned if it’s there! It simply can’t be. Not the greatest genius who ever lived could produce what I imagine I see.” He took a dozen new positions, standing long at each view point. But the illusion--it must be illusion!--refused to vanish. The work--the figure part of it--persisted in appealing to him as a product of transcendent genius. “That business didn’t stop a minute too soon--not a minute! For it’s evident I was on the verge of falling in love.” “On the verge?”... What was the meaning of the illusion of a picture greater than ever artist made?... On the verge? “Why, hang it all, I’ve done nothing but think about her since we kissed. I’m bewitched! I’m in love!”