He felt its absence but he could not define what it was that was absent, could not discover the nature of it.

He really began to feel the lack of it in his work, but he searched his canvas and his own heart in vain for any vacuum unfilled.
[Illustration: "He stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious _something_"] Then, too, had he himself not suffered?
What had that restless, miserable winter meant, if it had not meant sorrow?
He _had_ suffered--blindly it is true until the truth of his love for Valerie had suddenly confronted him.

Yet that restless pain--and the intense emotion of their awakening--all the doubts, all the anxieties--the wonder and happiness and sadness in the imminence of that strange future impending for them both--had altered nothing in his work--brought into it no new quality--unless, as he thought, it had intensified to a dazzling brilliancy the same qualities which already had made his work famous.
"It's all talk," he said to himself--"it's sentimental jargon, precious twaddle--all this mysterious babble about occult quality and humanity and sympathy.

If Jose Querida has the capacity of a chipmunk for mental agony, I've lost my bet that he hasn't." And all the time he was conscious that there _was_ something about Querida's work which made that work great; and that it was not in his own work, and that his own work was not great, and never had been great.
"But it will be," he said rather grimly to himself one day, turning with a shrug from his amazing canvas and pulling the unfinished portrait of Valerie into the cold north light.
For a long while he stood before it, searching in it for any hint of that elusive and mysterious _something_, and found none.
Moreover there was in the painting of this picture a certain candour amounting to stupidity--an uncertainty--a naive, groping sort of brush work.

It seemed to be technically, almost deliberately, muddled.
There was a tentative timidity about it that surprised his own technical assurance--almost moved him to contempt.
What had he been trying to do?
For what had he been searching in those slow, laborious, almost painful brush strokes--in that clumsy groping for values, in the painstaking reticence, the joyless and mathematical establishment of a sombre and uninspiring key, in the patient plotting of simpler planes where space and quiet reigned unaccented?
"Lord!" he said, biting his lip.