Free Murder Abroad by E.R. Punshon

you are, I do apologize.”
    â€œNo need,” Bobby assured him. “I suppose I’m traditional as far as I’m anything.”
    â€œLet me have a look at what you’ve been doing, may I?” asked Shields, and Bobby, who had brought his portfolio down with him from a vague wish not to be separated from work with which he was so pleased, promptly produced the sketch made that afternoon.
    Shields took it, raised his eyebrows, looked surprised, even a little relieved, Bobby thought.
    â€œI know that spot,” Shields said. “I’ve done it myself. You’ve a good eye for the right thing to spot it so quickly.” Then he said, almost accusingly: “You’ve moved that tree.”
    â€œWell, yes,” Bobby admitted. “I suppose I thought it tied up better there.”
    â€œSo it does,” agreed Shields. “Composes much better, catches the eye at once. Gives the whole thing more significance, unity. You’ve an eye for composition all right. Gad, it’s quite a relief to find a young fellow doing good sound honest-to-goodness work instead of all this modern inner reality stuff.” He looked at the sketch again. “Good work,” he said briefly.
    Bobby beamed. There had been times in his young life when he had dreamed of trying to earn his living by his pencil. Discovery that his eye for colour was defective and that though he had a distinct sense of form and a real ability to draw, his gifts even there were hardly outstanding, had persuaded him that he had small chance of ever being able to ‘muscle in’, as the Americans say, on an already much overcrowded profession. All the same, this warm appreciation of his afternoon’s work by a professional and apparently unusually successful artist gave him a very warm and comforting interior glow.
    Shields began to talk about himself. His work, it seemed, was not much appreciated in London. (‘Paris won’t look at it,’ he said in parenthesis, ‘and Berlin and Rome are washouts. No money, and if you did get any, you would have to leave it there.’) But he had a very useful connection in New York among private friends. Made a baker’s dozen of sales last year at an average of four hundred dollars each sale. Not so bad these days. Oh, journeyman’s work, it might be called. He never claimed to be a genius, but his stuff gave him pleasure to do and apparently gave pleasure to the people who bought it. At any rate, he knew no other reason why they did buy. God knew it wasn’t because it was fashionable. Bobby must come over to Barsac some time and have a look round his studio. He chuckled a good deal over this and admitted that such an invitation to the ordinary tourist sometimes meant a bid for a sale. (‘Walk into my studio, said the artist to the tourist’, explained Shields, still chuckling.) Well, a fellow had got to live. But a brother artist was safe. Artists didn’t buy pictures, they painted ’em.
    Bobby said how pleased he would be to accept the invitation and asked:
    â€œBarsac? Is it near here?”
    â€œWell, that depends,” Shields answered. “It lies between here and Clermont, about fifteen miles as the crow flies, over there.” He pointed north where the land rose into that tangle of hill and rock, ravine and crag, intermixed with long patches of scrub, which Bobby had remarked before. “But it takes three or four hours by train. You have to go round by Clermont and the connection is bad. By road, it is about four or five times as far as it would be direct. The road has to circle right round the Bornay Massif,” and he nodded again towards the desolation to the north where the bleak savagery of the land bore witness still to the convulsions of long ago.
    â€œIf it’s only fifteen miles direct, it would be almost as quick to walk, wouldn’t it?” Bobby asked.
    â€œI never heard of any one trying,”