The Key to Yesterday

tion than is accorded the generality. The only note missing was the necessity for hard application, which might have made him the master where he was satisfied to be the dilettante. The extreme cl

, the shallop of his own lesser talent and influence might act as convoy and guide, luring the greater craft into wider voyaging, he would be satisfied. Just now, that guidance ought to be away from the Marston influence where lay ultimate danger and limitation. He was glad that where people discussed Frederick Marston they also discussed his foremost disciple. Marston himself had loomed large in the star-chart of painting only a dozen years ago, and was now the greatest of luminaries. His follower had been known less than ha

ing," a thing of picturesque beauty. Its generous stone chimneys and wide hearths were reminders of the ancient days. Across its shingled roof, the sunlight was spotted with shadows thrown down from beeches and oaks that had been old

of their leafage. There were youth and opulence in the way they filtered the sun through their gnarled branches with a splattering and splashing of golden light. Blossoming dogwood spread clusters of white amid endless shades and conditions of green, and, when the view was not focused into the thickness of woodland interiors, it offered leagues of yellow fields and tend

ably clad in a flannel shirt and briar-torn, paint-spotted trousers. In his teeth, he clamped a

, looked up from an art journal at t

i-god is painting in Southern Spain. He continues to remain the recluse, avoiding the public gaze.

ne, and studied the h

nchant for frequent wanderings incognito and revealing himself only through his work is in itself a bid for publicity. He arrogates to himself the attributes of traveling royalty. For my mast

e lau

ot send over an unsigned canvas as a Marston, and drag him out o

y. "So long as the world has his art, what does it matter?" H

e and confident bearing, tempted by each vist

the shimmer of overhanging greenery. Out of a tangle of undergrowth beyond reared two slender poplars. T

red, his fingers were selecting the color tubes with

it seemed the specter had come out of the shadow, and taken the center of the stage, and in the spotlight he wore the features of Se?or Ribero. He had intended questioning Ribero, but had hesitated. The thing had been sudden, and it is humiliating to go to a man one has never met before to learn something of one's self, when that man has assumed an attit

oughts. Even his own speculation as to what the other man might ha

ared forearm, under the uprolled sleeve, was as

dress, a girlish figure, a sunbonnet and a huge cluster of dogwood blossoms. The sunbonnet and dogwood branches seemed conspiring to hide all the face

enough to reveal her face, the lancelike uprightness

u?" she demanded, innocently.

stammered, "I-I thoug

aneous. She did not confide to Saxon just why Steele's silence struck her as highly humorous. She knew, however, that

rward, and spoke with the br

were the most hazardous; that, because she seemed to him altogether wonderful, he distrusted his power to quarantine his heart against her artless magnetism. As he stood abashed at his own crassness, he wanted to tell her that he developed these crude strains only when he was thrown into touch with so fine grained a nature as her own; that it was the very sense of his own pariah-like circumstance. Then, before she had time to speak, came a swift artistic leaping at his heart. He should have known that she would be here! It was her rightful environment! She belonged as inherently under blossoming dogwood branches as the stars belong b

r attitude of uptilted chin. In all her little autocratic world, he

e same gay abandonment that comes to a man who, having faced ruin until his heart and brain are sick,

re things are commonplace, and here it all seems a sequence of wonders: this glorious country, the

might have fancied that you'd been running away ever since

id of you,

laug

myself until I was seventeen. I've never quite

yesterday, I wanted to be friends with you so much

aces. It went out of his eyes as suddenly as an electric bulb switched off, leaving the features thos

did you happen to begin art?" she inquir

ead, then the

w started me,"

eyes were once

e starving at their grazing places. Usually, the breeze from the Japanese current blows off the snow from time to time, and we can graze the st

ompted. "But

, and wrote back, 'This is how.' The boss showed that picture around, and some folk thought it bore so much family resemblance

d!" she concluded

make good,"

pause, s

to some places along the creek wher

hed for his

there," h

nded. "I spoke of

romptly replied; "bett

her head

gin as an interrup

idently, "the good general first

sing the meadow toward the roof of her house which topped the foliage not far away. Then, he held up his right