"Go on," I murmured. "This at least is truth!"
Mabane paused. He looked at his pipe, but he did not relight it.
"There is a change coming," he said, slowly. "We are going to drift no longer. We are going to be drawn into the maelstrom of life. What it may mean for you and for me and for the boy, I do not know. It will change us—it must change our work. I shall paint no more guesses at realism—after someone else; and you will write no more of princesses, or pull the strings of tinsel-decked puppets, so that they may dance their way through the pages of your gaily-dressed novels. And an end has come to these things, Arnold. No, I am not raving, nor is this a jest. Wait!"
"You speak," I told him, "like a seer. Since when was it given to you to read the future so glibly, my friend?"
Mabane looked at me with grave eyes. There was no shadow of levity in his manner.
"I am not a superstitious man, Arnold," he said, "but I come, after all, of hill-folk, and I believe that there are times when one can feel and see the shadow of coming things. My grandfather knew the day of his death, and spoke of it; my father made his will before he set foot on the steamer which went to the bottom on a calm day between Dover and Ostend. Nothing of this sort has ever come to me before. You yourself have called me too hard-headed, too material for an artist. So I have always thought myself—until to-day. To-day I feel differently."
"Is it this child, then, who is to open the gates of the world to us?" I asked.
"Remember," Mabane answered, "that before many months have passed she will be a woman."
I moved in my chair a little uneasily.
"I wonder," I said, half to myself, "whether I did well to bring her here!"