The artist found himself surrounded by a riotous revel of leafy exuberance. The year’s “primal burst” had occurred, not in reluctant spasmodic fits and starts, as is usual in our intermittent fine weather, but in a grand universal outpouring of the earth’s sap. His imagination answered spontaneously to this appeal, and his note-books were speedily filled with hurried passionate sketches, made at all hours of the long bright days, and full of suggestive charm. One particularly lovely afternoon the American found himself wandering slowly up the hill from the little Nevilton station, after a brief excursion to Yeoborough in search of pigments and canvas. He was hoping to take advantage of this auspicious stirring of his imaginative senses, by entering upon some more important and more continuous work. The Nevilton ladies had assured him that it would be quite impossible to find in the little town the kind of materials he needed; and he was returning in high spirits to assure them that he had completely falsified their prediction. He suspected Gladys of having invented this difficulty with a view to confining his labours to such easily shared sketching-trips as she might accompany him upon, but though the fascination of the romping and toying girl still retained, and had even increased, its power over him; he was, in this case, impelled and driven by a force stronger and more dominant than any sensual attraction. He was in a better mood for painting than he had ever been in his life, and nothing could interfere with his resolution to exploit this mood to its utmost limit. With the most precious of his newly purchased materials under his arm and the more bulky ones promised him that same evening, Dangelis, as he drifted slowly up the sunny road chatting amicably with such rural marketers as overtook him, felt in a peculiarly harmonious temper. He had recently, in the western cities of the States, won a certain fiercely contested notoriety in the art of portrait-painting, an art which he had come more and more to practise according to the very latest of those daring modern theories, which are summed up sometimes under the not very illuminative title of Post-impressionism, and he had, during the last few days, indulged in a natural and irresistible wish to associate this new departure with his personal experiences at Nevilton. Gossiping nonchalantly with the village-wives, as he ascended the dusty road, by the vicarage wall, his thoughts ran swiftly over the motley-coloured map of his past life, and the deviating track across the world which he had been led to follow. He congratulated himself in his heart, as he indulged in easy persiflage with his fellow-wayfarers, upon his consistent freedom from everything that might choke or restrain the freedom of his will.