refinements of unease which discipline allowed. The trackers had come and gone. The yearly Treaty party had passed through from some vague place on the map, and they too had gone. Even the birds had left Grey Wolf before the hunters went to the chilling woods for their long season of silence and labour. Sleighs took the place of wheels, and furs of light coats and uniforms. Tempest had several long journeys on special investigation business, and Dick had much outline work, with or without Kennedy's help. Twice he had written to Jennifer; once she had answered—just a few sweet, true, simple lines, like herself, and Dick carried them in his breast-pocket with the little picture he had made of her. And, when time allowed him, he painted Andree.
He had meant to paint a few pictures of her only. To rouse her vanity to a living force and then persuade her to break with Tempest completely. He knew that nothing short of her actual refusal to speak to him or touch him would cure Tempest. How deeply the man loved her he hardly knew. But how terribly her coquetries and her indifference and her occasional half-yieldings were affecting him Dick knew well. It was time to stop this thing. He should have stopped it long ago. And yet he did not. An explanation with Tempest would mean a discontinuance of those hours which were a sheer delight to the artist in him, and, though this he guessed but vaguely, to more than the artist.
Dick had that force of spirit which dashed colour and heat on all things which he chose to handle. He had the insight which is brutal in its clarity of interpretation, and he had the sick and restless soul which can never run straight to any goal. All these things made a very good medium through which to paint Grange's Andree, and Grange himself began to take pride in the filling portfolio that stood in the corner of the little back-parlour. That girl-head with the smooth round arms and shoulders came to be a joy to more than Dick. He turned her into an Indian, with hair sleeked down, and olive limbs straight and tall. He made a Greek girl of her, draping her with sheets from Moosta's box. He painted her with hair and dress blown back, hauling on a team of husky dogs brought
