Yet, at times, an indefinable unease possessed him as though some occult struggle was impending for which he was unprepared.
That struggle had already begun, but he did not know it.
On the contrary all his latent strength and brilliancy had revived, exquisitely virile; and the new canvas on which he began now to work blossomed swiftly into magnificent florescence.
A superb riot of colour bewitched the entire composition; never had his brushes swept with such sun-tipped fluency, never had the fresh splendour of his hues and tones approached so closely to convincing himself in the hours of fatigue and coldly sober reaction from the auto-intoxication of his own facility.
That auto-intoxication had always left his mind and his eye steady and watchful, although drugged--like the calm judgment of the intoxicated opportunist at the steering wheel of a racing motor.

And a race once run and ended, a deliberate consideration of results usually justified the pleasure of the pace.
Yet that mysterious something which some said he lacked, had not yet appeared.

That _something_, according to many, was an elusive quality born of a sympathy for human suffering--an indefinable and delicate bond between the artist and his world--between a master who has suffered, and all humanity who understands.
The world seemed to recognise this subtle bond between themselves and Querida's pictures.

Yet in the pictures there was never any sadness.

Had Querida ever suffered?
Was it in that olive-skinned, soft-voiced young man to suffer ?--a man apparently all grace and unruffled surface and gentle charm--a man whose placid brow remained smooth and untroubled by any line of perplexity or of sorrow.
And as Neville studied his own canvas coolly, logically, with an impersonal scrutiny that almost amounted to hostility, he wondered what it was in Querida's work that still remained absent in his.