I don't sing a song about art, but art is the essence of existence to me."

    He looked at her expectantly, pleadingly. She shook her head.

    "I cannot get any more money that way," she said. "I'd sooner die." She shivered at the recollection. "Don't let us talk about it. Father," she said.

    Presently he got up and strolled disconsolately about the room, posing before the half-finished portrait of her which had been begun when she was three years younger.

    "There's the makings of a picture," he said. "I've a jolly good mind to concentrate on that."

    Later, however, she found him in the studio examining another incomplete canvas.

    "A couple of weeks' work on that, Stella, and, by gad! I've got an Academy picture!"

    "Why don't you make a start. Father?" she asked. "I'll help you fix the palette. Get into your smock and start."

    "There's tons of time," he said airily. "I'm going to see if I can find a professional. One round would make a man of me."

    She saw him afterwards disappearing into the valley, with his caddie behind him and the professional walking by his side, a man without a care in the world, without a thought of tomorrow or a real regret for yesterday.

    When he came back to lunch he was so bright and confident, so dogmatic and optimistic, that she knew that his good resolution of the morning was already an amusing memory.

    "It is knowing where to stop, Stella, that makes all the difference between a man and a fool," he said. "There is nobody who knows better than myself when he's had enough. The trouble with me is that I am an artist. My mind goes wandering into rosy dreamlands, and I drink mechanically, without realising that I am drinking at all." He laughed outrageously and pinched her cheek. "We'll have that Pygmalion finished in a week," he said. "You think that's a stupid promise, don't you? I can tell you, my dear, that as a young man, when I painted the picture which made me famous—Homer drinking the hemlock—I began to work on the Sunday morning and the thing was finished on Tuesday night. Of course I touched it up afterwards."

    She had heard the story innumerable times.

    "Did you drink anything at the club, Father?"

    The club was a tiny bungalow at the end of the village, and had perhaps the smallest membership of any golfing club in the world.

    "Just a whisky and soda," he said airily, and added something about a man knowing when he had had enough.

    Kenneth Nelson had the habit of repression, a habit to which neurotics are susceptible. He could put out of his mind any aspect of life and every memory of word or deed that was unpleasant to think about, or shocked his artistic soul. He referred to this facility as a gift; it was, in fact, a weakness, symptomatic of his neurosis. His speech abounded in wise sayings, old saws that had crystallised into a habit of thought. His favourite, and, indeed, the only poetical quotation, was that stanza from Omar which deals with the inevitability of the moving finger.

    "Oh, by the way, Stella, we have a visitor at the guesthouse. Upon my word, it is poetical justice," he chuckled. "That rascal Bellingham was a thief, a burglar. By gad! I shouldn't have slept soundly if I had known that."

    The girl wondered what there was in the house, other than unfinished paintings, that might have tempted the errant Scottie.

    Before her father could continue she had an intuitive knowledge of what he was going to say.

    "The detective?" she asked quickly.

    He nodded.

    "He is staying here for a day or two—quite an interesting fellow, a most charming fellow. He's a guest of Merrivan's in a sense. You know how Merrivan picks up odd people, impossible people as a rule; but this time he's picked a winner. This detective fellow—Andrew, Andrew, what the devil is it? A Scottish name. I never can remember all the Macs."

    "Macleod."

    "Andrew Macleod, that's it! Well, he is the fellow who was sent down to arrest the burglar, and very smart he was about it. He is quite a lion. Of course, it is unusual to find a detective who is a gentleman, except in books.