He took both her hands in his and kissed them.

"It's several years since I expected anything," he answered. "Now--I only hope."

Nan smiled.

"Come in, pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the flat doesn't run to whisky-and-soda."

"Coffee, please--and your conversation--will suffice. 'A Loaf of Bread . . . and Thou beside me singing in the Wilderness' . . ."

"You'd much prefer a whisky-and-soda and a grilled steak to the loaf and--the et ceteras," observed Nan cynically. "There's a very wide gulf between what a man says and what he thinks."

"There's a much wider one between what a man wants and what he gets," he returned grimly.

"You'll soon have all you want," she answered. "You're well on the way to fame already."

"Do you know," he remarked irrelevantly, "your eyes are exactly like blue violets. I'd like to paint you, Nan."

"Perhaps I'll sit for you some day," she replied, handing him his coffee.

"That is, if you're very good."

Maryon Rooke was a man the merit of whose work was just beginning to be noticed in the art world. For years he had laboured unacknowledged and with increasing bitterness--for he knew his own worth. But now, though, still only in his early thirties, his reputation, particularly as a painter of women's portraits, had begun to be noised abroad. His feet were on the lower rungs of the ladder, and it was generally prophesied that he would ultimately reach the top. His gifts were undeniable, and there was a certain ruthlessness in the line of the lips above the small Van Dyck beard he wore which suggested that he would permit little to stand in the way of his attaining his goal--be it what it might.

"You'd make a delightful picture, Sun-kissed," he said, narrowing his eyes and using one of his most frequent names for her. "With your blue violet eyes and that rose-petal skin of yours."

Nan smiled involuntarily.

"Don't be so flowery, Maryon. Really, you and Penelope are very good antidotes to each other! She's just been giving me a lecture on the error of my ways. She doesn't waste any breath over my appearance, bless her!"

"What's the crime?"

"Lack of application, waste of opportunities, and general idleness."

"It's all true." Rooke leaned forward, his eyes lit by momentary enthusiasm. They were curious eyes--hazel brown, with a misleading softness in them that appealed to every woman he met. "It's all true,"

he repeated. "You could do big things, Nan. And you do nothing."

Nan laughed, half-pleased, half-vexed.

"I think you overrate my capabilities."

"I don't. There are very few pianists who have your technique, and fewer still, your soul and power of interpretation."

"Oh, yes, there are. Heaps. And they've got what I lack."

"And that is?"

"The power to hold their audience."

"You lack that? You who can hold a man--"

She broke in excitedly.

"Yes, I can hold one man--or woman. I can play to a few people and hold them. I know that. But--I can't hold a crowd."

Rooke regarded her thoughtfully. Perhaps it was true that in spite of her charm, of the compelling fascination which made her so unforgettable--did he not know how unforgettable!--she yet lacked the tremendous force of magnetic personality which penetrates through a whole concourse of people, temperamentally differing as the poles, and carries them away on one great tidal wave of enthusiasm and applause.

"It may be true," he said, at last, reluctantly. "I don't think you possess great animal magnetism! Yours is a more elusive, more--how shall I put it?--an attraction more spirituelle. . . . To those it touches, worse luck, a more enduring one."

"More enduring?"

"Far more. Animal magnetism is a thing of bodily presence. Once one is away from it--apart--one is free. Until the next meeting! But _your_ victims aren't even free from you when you're not there."

"It sounds a trifle boring. Like a visitor who never knows when it's time to go."

Rooke smiled.

"You're trying to switch me off the main theme, which is your work."

She sprang up.

"Don't bully me any more," she said quickly, "and I'll play you one of my recent compositions."

She sauntered across to the piano and began to play a little ripping melody, full of sunshine and laughter, and though a sob ran through it, it was smothered by the overlying gaiety. Rooke crossed to her side and quietly lifted her hands from the keys.

"Charming," he said. "But it doesn't ring true. That was meant for a sad song. As it stands, it's merely flippant--insincere. And insincerity is the knell of art."

Nan skimmed the surface defiantly.

"What a disagreeable criticism! You might have given me some encouragement instead of crushing my poor little attempt at composition like that!"

Rooke looked at her gravely. With him, sincerity in art was a fetish; in life, a superfluity. But for the moment he was genuinely moved. The poseur's mask which he habitually wore slipped aside and the real man peeped out.

"Yours ought to be more than attempts," he said quietly. "It's in you to do something really big. And you must do it. If not, you'll go to pieces. You don't understand yourself."

"And do you profess to?"

"A little." He smiled down at her. "The G.o.ds have given you the golden gift--the creative faculty. And there's a price to pay if you don't use the gift."

Nan's "blue violet" eyes held a startled look.

"You've got something which isn't given to everyone. To precious few, in fact! And if you don't use it, it will poison everything. We artists _may not_ rust. If we do, the soul corrodes."

The sincerity of his tone was unmistakable. Art was the only altar at which Rooke worshipped, it was probably the only altar at which he ever would worship consistently. Nan suddenly yielded to the driving force at the back of his speech.

"Listen to this, then," she said. "It's a setting to some words I came across the other day."

She handed him a slip of paper on which the words were written and his eyes ran swiftly down the verses of the brief lyric:

EMPTY HANDS