One afternoon late he went to the door to get the full benefit of a cool breeze that had sprung up. He saw, a few hundred yards away, Rix and a man climbing up through the dense woods toward his workshop. He wheeled round, rushed in and put the picture away--far back in the depths of the closet, behind a lot of other pictures. In its place on the easel he set a barely begun sketch--one of his attempts to distract his mind. Then, with no alteration in his appearance--his hair was mussed this way and that, and his negligee shirt was open at the neck and rolled up to the elbows--he lit a cigarette and sauntered to the door again. His not making any effort to improve upon his appearance was characteristic and significant; rarely indeed has there been a human being habitually less self-conscious than he. It would take a very vain person to continue to think of himself or herself on becoming suddenly a spectator at some scene of tremendous interest. Roger was in that state of mind all the time. His senses were so eager, his mind so inquisitive, his powers of observation so acute that his thoughts were like bees on a bright, summer day--always roving, and returning home only to unload what had been gathered and quickly depart again in quest of more from the outside. As the ascent was steep he had ample time to compose his thoughts and his expression. She must not see or feel anything that would make it, however little, harder to pursue the road Fate had marked out for her. The man beside her was obviously her father--obviously, though there was no similarity of face or manner or figure. The relationship was revealed in that evasive similarity called family favor--a similarity which startlingly asserts itself even in dissimilarities, as if the soul and the body had a faint aureole which appeared only at certain angles and in certain lights. He was a little, thin man--dry and dyspeptic--with one of those deceptive retreating chins of insignificant size that indicate cunning instead of weakness. He had a big, sharp nose, a rough skin and scraggly mustache, with restless, gray-green eyes. He was very slouchily dressed in dusty gray. When he took off his straw hat to wipe his brow Roger was astonished by the sudden view of a really superb upper head which transformed his aspect from merely sly to dangerously crafty--the man with the nature of a fox and the intelligence to make that nature not simply a local nuisance but a general scourge. “I’d like to paint him,” thought Roger--and compliment could no further go in an artist who detested portrait work.