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slowly and said, “Perhaps. And one doesn’t die, you know. One doesn’t die.”

Lypiatt was leaning back, staring fixedly up at her. The tears were dry on his face, his cheeks were flushed. “Do you know what it is,” he asked, “to love so much, that you begin to long for the anodyne of physical pain to quench the pain in the soul? You don’t know that.” And suddenly, with his clenched fist, he began to bang the wooden dais on which he was kneeling, blow after blow, with all his strength.

Mrs. Viveash leant forward and tried to arrest his hand. “You’re mad, Casimir,” she said. “You’re mad. Don’t do that.” She spoke with anger.

Lypiatt laughed till his face was all broken up with the grimace and proffered for her inspection his bleeding knuckles. The skin hung in little white tags and tatters and from below the blood was slowly oozing up to the surface. “Look,” he said and laughed again. Then suddenly, with an extraordinary agility, he jumped to his feet, bounded from the dais and began once more to stride up and down the fairway between his easel and the door.

“By God,” he kept repeating, “by God, by God. I feel it in me. I can face the whole lot of you; the whole damned lot. Yes, and I shall get the better of you yet. An Artist——” he called up that traditional ghost and it comforted him; he wrapped himself with a protective gesture within the ample folds of its bright mantle—“an Artist doesn’t fail under unhappiness. He gets new strength from it. The torture makes him sweat new masterpieces. . . .”

He began to talk about his books, his poems and pictures; all the great things in his head, the things