Rainham gazed after her until she had turned the corner.

"I'm sorry to have treated you to this—scene," he said apologetically, as he joined Oswyn, who was gazing over the narrow bridge. "I felt bound to do something for the girl, after she had been wasting all that time outside my gates. Did you notice what a pretty, refined face she had? I wonder who the man can be—Crichton, Cecil Crichton, wasn't it?... I never heard the name before. It doesn't sound like a sailor's name."

"Cecil Crichton?" echoed the other. "No ... and yet it sounds familiar. Perhaps I am thinking of the Admirable, though he wasn't Cecil, as far as I remember. The old story, I suppose. Cecil Crichton—ah, Cyril Crichton?" he repeated. Then, dismissing the subject somewhat brutally, "Ah, well, it's no business of mine! Will you give me a light? Thanks!"



CHAPTER VII

At three o'clock Lightmark dismissed his model—an Italian, with a wonderfully fine torso and admirable capabilities for picturesque pose, whom he had easily persuaded to abandon his ice-cream barrow to sit for him two or three times a week, acting the part of studio servant in the intervals.

"That will do, Cesare," he said, "aspetto persone; besides, you're shivering: I shall have you catching cold next, and I can't paint while you're sneezing. Yes, you're quite right, e un freddo terribile, considering that it's July. Off with you now, and come again at the same time on Friday. Si conservi—that's to say, don't get drunk in the interval; it makes you look such a brute that I can't paint you."

While the model transformed himself from a scantily-attired Roman gladiator into an Italian of the ordinary Saffron Hill description, Lightmark hastily washed his brushes, turned down his shirt sleeves, and donned the becoming velvet painting-jacket, which Mrs. Dollond had so much admired.

"I hope they won't notice Cesare's pipe," he said anxiously. "Even though he doesn't smoke here, it always seems to hang about. Perhaps I had better open the window and burn a pastille. And now, are we prepared to receive Philistia? Yes, I don't think the place looks bad, and—but perhaps Mrs. Sylvester mightn't like the gladiator. He certainly is deucedly anatomical at present. I'll go and leave him in Copal's studio, and then I can borrow his tea-things at the same time."

The studio was a lofty room on the ground-floor with an elaborately-devised skylight, and a large window facing north, through which a distant glimpse of Holland Park could be obtained. Lightmark had covered the floor with pale Indian matting, with a bit of strong colour, here and there, in the shape of a modern Turkish rug. For furniture, he had picked up some old chairs and a large straight-backed settee with grotesquely-carved legs, which, with the aid of a judicious arrangement of drapery, looked eminently attractive, and conveyed an impression of comfort which closer acquaintance did not altogether belie. Then there was the platform, covered with dark cloth, on which his models posed; the rickety table with many drawers, in which he kept brushes and colours; a lay figure, disguised as a Venetian flower-girl, which had collapsed tipsily into a corner; two or three easels; and a tall, stamped leather screen, which was useful for backgrounds. A few sketches, mostly unframed, stood in a row on the narrow shelf which ran along the pale-green distempered walls; and more were stacked in the corners—some in portfolios, and some with their dusty backs exposed to view. The palette which he had been using lay, like a great fantastic leaf, upon the table, amid a chaos of broken crayons, dingy stumps, photographs of sitters, pellets of bread, disreputable colour-tubes, and small bottles of linseed-oil, varnish, and turpentine. A sketch for Mrs. Sylvester's portrait, in crayons, was propped against the foot of an easel (Lightmark hoped that her son might buy it for his chambers); the canvas which he had prepared against the much-delayed sitting due from Miss Sylvester exposed its blank surface on another. A tall Japanese jar full of purple and yellow irises, a tribute to his expected guests, stood on the dusty black stove.

He had barely had time to arrange the borrowed tea-things, and to set a kettle on a little spirit-lamp behind the screen, when Mrs. Dollond and her husband were announced. He threw his black sombrero somewhat theatrically into a corner, and advanced with effusion to meet them. Mrs. Dollond had taken a decided interest in the young painter ever since the delightfully uncandid reflection of her by no means youthful beauty, which he had exhibited at the Grosvenor, had provoked so much comment among her friends.

She was a plump, little, fair-haired woman, with blue eyes, a very pink and white complexion, small hands, and a passion for dress with which people who had known her before her marriage, as a slim maiden devoted to sage-green draperies and square-toed shoes, declined to credit her, until they were told that she had, to put it plainly, grown fat—a development which compelled her to give up aestheticism and employ a modiste.

Her husband, who followed her into the room, carrying her impedimenta, wore the bored expression of the R.A. who is expected to admire the work of an outsider. He was the abject slave of his good-natured wife—she was good-natured, in spite of her love of scandal—and his only fault from her point of view, and his greatest one in the eyes of people in general, lay in an unfortunate habit of thinking aloud, a dangerous characteristic, which persons who are apt to find themselves in the position of critic should at any cost eradicate. Luckily, his benevolence was such that these outspoken comments were never really virulent, and not often offensive.

Mrs. Dollond seated herself smilingly on the least rickety chair, disposed of her veil with one neatly-gloved hand, and prepared a tortoiseshell eyeglass for action with the other.

"What a charming portrait!" she said, pointing with her plump index-finger to the sketch of Mrs. Sylvester. "Do I know the lady, I wonder? Oh! I do believe it's that Mrs. Sylvester."

"Yes," said Lightmark. "If you remember, you introduced me to her at the Academy soiree last year. I expect her here this afternoon, with her daughter. I am going to paint Miss Sylvester's portrait."

"Ah," said Mrs. Dollond mischievously, "and that accounts for the pastille. You never made such preparations when I sat to you. I suppose you thought that a painter's wife could not possibly object to tobacco."

"And she certainly doesn't, judging by her consumption of cigarettes!" interposed her husband.

"Hugh, I'm ashamed of you. You know I'm a martyr to asthma—and cigarettes aren't tobacco. But how old is Miss Sylvester? Is she pretty?"

"Don't ask me to describe her, Mrs. Dollond. Wait till you see her—she's coming, you know. What do you think of that river-scape, most reverend signor? It's one of the little things I've been doing down at Rainham's Dock—down at Blackpool."

The Academician tried to appear interested as he assumed the conventional bird-like pose of the picture-gazer, and surveyed the sketch.

"Very pretty—very pretty! I should hardly have thought it was the Thames, though. It isn't muddy enough. In fact, the whole scheme of colour is much too clean for London. Quite absurd! Not a bit like it! Eh, my dear, what was I saying? Oh yes, I like the effect of the sunlight on that brown sail immensely. It's really very clever, very clever."

Mrs. Dollond, who never knew what her husband would say next, welcomed the influx of a small throng of visitors with a sigh of relief.

The Sylvesters and Philip Rainham, arriving at the same time, found the little studio almost crowded. Besides the Dollonds there were two or three of the Turk Street fraternity; a young sculptor, newly arrived from Rome, with his wife; Dionysus F. Quain, an American interested in petroleum, who had patronized Lightmark also at Rome; and Copal, whose studio was in the same building, and who was manifestly anxious about his Chelsea teacups.

Mrs. Sylvester greeted her protege with a flattering degree of warmth which was entirely absent from the stare and conventional smile with which she honoured Mrs. Dollond, and the somewhat impertinent air of patronage which she wore when one or two of the young artists were introduced to her. If they did not mind, Mrs. Dollond was inclined to be resentful, for the moment, at least; and, as a preliminary attack, she maliciously encouraged Eve, who, ensconced in a corner, blissfully unconscious of the maternal anxiety which the other matron had detected, was eagerly turning over the contents of a portfolio which she had unearthed from its lurking-place behind her chair.

Rainham was looking over her shoulder, admiring the charming poise of the girl's head, and the contours of her wrists and hands, as she submitted the drawings to his inspection. Charles Sylvester stationed himself close by, and devoted himself to buttonholing the American senator, to the obvious discomfort of his victim, whose knowledge of Pennsylvanian oil-wells was infinitely greater than his acquaintance with the rudiments of summary jurisdiction, as practised in his native State, and who, after hazarding a remark to the effect that Judge Lynch had long since retired from the Bench, had, as he would have put it, "pretty considerably petered out."

"I hope my daughter isn't indiscreet?" Mrs. Sylvester had hazarded, after catching Lightmark's eye on its return journey from a glance in the direction of the little group in the corner; and the young man had reassured her hastily, before misgivings had time to assail him, and when they did, he hoped for the best. For a painter's portfolio is, after all, hardly less confidential than a diary, and may be on occasion almost as compromising, in spite of the fact that the records it contains are written in cipher.

The sunlight, mellowed to a dull straw colour by its passage through London air, slanted in at the window, falling first on Charles Sylvester's handsome face, with its eminently professional, severely cut features, and the careful limitation of whisker, which seemed so completely in harmony with his shaven upper lip and the unsympathetic scrutiny of his double eyeglass; then, losing some of its brightness among the little ripples of brown hair which a gracious Providence had forbidden her hat to conceal, fell like a halo upon the pale green wall behind Eve's head.

The young artists—the "boys," as they would have called themselves—were circulating busily with teacups and petits fours, and the chatter of voices bore testimony to the preponderance of the Bohemian element. It is only the dwellers on the confines who lose their voices in the Temple of Art—a goddess who, to judge by her votaries, is not wont to take pleasure in silence.

"Oh," said Eve, in reply to one of Rainham's remarks, "is that Bordighera? What lovely blue water! and what perfectly delicious little fishing-boats! I should like to go there. Charles is going to take us to Lucerne in a week or two, you know, when the Long Vacation begins. But I suppose we shall hardly get to Italy."

"Yes, that's Bordighera"—with a sigh—"my happy hunting-ground. And the water is much bluer really—only don't tell Dick I said so. Yes, you ought to go there. If you stayed late enough you would have me dropping in on you one fine day, as soon as the fogs begin here. Happy thought! Why shouldn't we all winter out there?"

"That would be nice," said Eve, rather doubtfully; "but, you know, there's Charles—he would have to come back for the Law Courts in the autumn, and he would be so lonely all by himself. And—and there's my portrait. Mr. Lightmark wants to get that ready for next year's Academy; and I can't sit to him very often, as it is, because of chaperons, you know."

Meanwhile Lightmark was telling Mrs. Dollond, in a confidential undertone, some story of a fair American sitter, who, on his expressing himself dissatisfied with his efforts worthily to transfer her complexion to canvas, had at once offered to send her maid round to his studio with an assortment of her favourite poudre de rose. Dollond listened with an amused smile to a recital of the sculptor's impressions of the Salon, which he had taken on his way from Rome. Copal was making desperate efforts to count his precious teacups, a task which their scattered positions rendered distressingly difficult. Charles Sylvester was somewhat listlessly cross-examining a P.R.A. in embryo as to the exact meaning of "breadth" in a painting; and Mr. Quain had been making his way as unostentatiously as the creakiness of his boots would permit towards the door. Eve had despatched one of "the boys" in search of a portfolio to replace the one which she had exhausted, and another had been entrusted with the safe bestowal of her empty teacup. The new portfolio, when it arrived, proved to be filled, not as the others, with landscapes and waterscapes, but with studies from life—Capri fisher girls, groups of market people, Venetian boatmen, and hasty sketches for portraits.

Eve paused rather longer than usual over one of these, the picture of a pretty fair-haired girl, dressed as Pierrette, the general lack of detail and absence of background only making the vigorously outlined face more distinct.

"What a pretty girl, Philip!" said the young critic presently; "and how curiously she's dressed! What is she intended to represent? Is it a fancy dress?... Mr. Rainham, if you don't attend, I won't show you any more pictures."

"Tyrant," said Rainham absently, as he carried his eyes from the contemplative stare with which they had been regarding the vagaries of a butterfly on the skylight. "What have you found now?—Kitty, by Jove!"

He had no sooner uttered these last three words, in a very different tone to that of his previous idle remarks, than he cursed his indiscretion. It was a piece of gaucherie which he would find it hard to forgive in himself, and Lightmark might well resent it.

"Kitty?" asked Eve, with some surprise, "who is Kitty? Mr. Lightmark, please tell us who this charming young lady, whom Mr. Rainham calls Kitty, is, since he won't."

"Kitty?" repeated Lightmark, with only a momentary hesitation, which the suddenness of the query might well account for; "I'm afraid I don't quite remember. There are so many Kitties, you know. All models are either Kitty or Polly. But if Rainham says it's Kitty, depend upon it he's right. He's got a wonderful memory for faces, especially pretty ones.—Yes," he added mischievously, "you ask Rainham."

Mrs. Sylvester looked uneasy, and, to her subsequent disgust, began to press "dear Mrs. Dollond" to come and see her.

Charles, who had looked up sharply at the first mention of the name, which had so disturbed the usually imperturbable Rainham, fixed his interrogative glasses first on the latter and then on Lightmark, and finally let them rest, with an expression of inquiring censure, on Rainham, whose confusion savoured to his mind so unmistakably of guilt that "Gentlemen of the jury" rose almost automatically to his lips. Nor did Rainham's attempt to smooth matters assist him.

"I must have seen the girl at the studio," he said, "when Lightmark was painting her. It's certainly a striking likeness, and that's what astonished me, you know. Almost like seeing a ghost. Ah, that little fellow used to sit for Lightmark in Rome—little sunburnt ruffian. We picked him up on the Ghetto, almost starving, and he got quite an artistic connection before we left. He was positively growing too fat; prosperity spoiled him as a model."

"Really?" said Eve listlessly. "I don't think I want to look at any more drawings; one can have too much of a good thing, and it must be time for us to go. We're dining out, and Charles doesn't like dressing in a hurry. Yes, mamma is buttoning her gloves. Good-bye, Mr. Rainham. Shall we see you again before we go to Switzerland? Ah, well, let's hope so. Au revoir, Mr. Lightmark. If you really think it's worth while for me to give you a solitary sitting next week——"

"If you would be so good. You see, I should have some ideas to go on with. Don't I deserve some reward, too, for allowing Rainham to monopolize you all the afternoon? And if you don't give me a sitting now, I'm afraid you will forget all about it when you come back to town; whereas, if we make a beginning, you will have to see it through—you will be compromised."

"What a stupid expression!" thought Mrs. Sylvester as the carriage rolled along the Kensington highroad.

Charles was unusually silent during the drive. The subject which occupied his thoughts was not one which he would have dreamed of ventilating even with his mother, and Eve's presence seemed to render the faintest allusion to it impracticable.

He had no great affection or even regard for Philip Rainham, whom he contemplated with that undefined disdain which a younger man so often feels for one who is too old to be on his own level, and too young to inspire reverence. The half-pitying regard which Mrs. Sylvester bestowed on the man who had been to her husband as a very dear younger brother had never furthered Rainham's advancement in her son's favour; and the manner in which Eve had centred her childish affections in Philip, who had made her his especial favourite, was even more prejudicial to his interests in that quarter. Hitherto, indeed, Sylvester's vague dislike had been so undemonstrative and immaterial that he would hardly have owned to it as such, and far less would he have acknowledged that he was, however unconsciously, feeling for a peg on which to hang it, for ground to support it; and yet from the first moment when the man's startled voice drew the questioning eyes upon his embarrassment, the judicial mind had been able to plume itself upon the penetration which had enabled it to detect something of doubtful odour about him from the first. "Kitty!" That word might explain so much—Rainham's long sojourns away from his business, for example.

Charles looked at Eve and frowned. Decidedly, thought the young moralist, the old intimacy must be discouraged. Nor did the fact that Rainham had been the source of his first brief, as well as of subsequent others, though it was not forgotten, suggest the advisability of a compromise; he even began to take a certain pride in the determination with which he was bringing himself to contemplate the sacrifice of so useful a friendship.

When they reached home there was barely time to dress for dinner, and Charles had no opportunity for a tete-a-tete discussion of the situation with his mother that evening. And as he breakfasted early next day and dined at the club, he had ample time in which to determine that, for the present, he would avoid anything in the shape of a family conference, and would content himself with keeping his eye on the mauvais sujet.



CHAPTER VIII

As soon as Lightmark and Rainham were left alone in the twilight of the studio, the former flung himself into a chair with a sigh of relief, and devoted himself to rolling and lighting a cigarette. Rainham picked up his hat, consulted his watch, with a preoccupation of mind which prevented him from noticing what the time was, and, refusing the proffered tobacco-pouch and the suggested whisky-and-soda, seemed about to go. Then he stopped, with his back turned towards his host and a pretence of examining a sketch.

"I'm sorry I made such an ass of myself about that study—that girl, you know," he said presently. "The fact is, I saw her the other day, and the coincidence was rather startling."

Lightmark blew a light cloud of smoke from his lips before he spoke.

"Oh, it doesn't matter in the least, old man. You didn't implicate me, as it happened, though I'm afraid you got yourself into rather hot water. A poor devil of a painter must have models, and it's recognised, but men of business——! It's quite another thing. There's no possible connection between girls and dry docks." Then he added lightly, "Where are you going to dine to-night? Let's go to one of our Leicester Square haunts, or shall we get into a hansom and drive to Richmond? I've sold old Quain a picture, and I feel extravagantly inclined. What do you say? Under which chef? Speak, or let's toss up."

Rainham appeared to consider for a moment; then he sat down again.

"About that girl," he said; "I suppose you do remember something about her? She must have been very pretty when you painted her, though she's nothing wonderful now, poor thing! I don't want to pump you, Dick, but she seems to have been pretty badly treated, and I want to see if I can't help her."

"Help her!" with a shrug. "For goodness' sake tell me: is it Don Quixote or Don Lothario that you are playing?"

"I should have thought you need hardly have asked," answered the other a little sadly. "I found the wretched creature waiting, with an equally wretched baby, both apparently not far from starvation, outside the dock the other night; and—well, I thought she might be waiting for you."

Lightmark threw the stump of his cigarette into a corner viciously, with a dangerous glance at the other.

"Why the devil should she have been waiting for me? Did she say she was waiting for me? How should a model know that I had been painting there? But I don't want to quarrel with you, and, after all you've done for me, I suppose you've a certain right to put yourself in loco parentis, and all that sort of thing. Tell me all you have found out about the girl—all she has told you, that is to say, and then I'll see what I can do."

This masterly suggestion seemed to Rainham both plausible and practical, and he proceeded to unfold the whole story of his first meeting with Kitty. When he reached the part of his narrative which brought out the girl's explanation that she was seeking to speak with a Mr. Crichton, Lightmark looked at him again covertly, with the same threatening light in his glance. Then, apparently reassured, he resigned himself again to listen, with a cigarette unlighted between his fingers.

"You say Oswyn heard the whole story?" he asked, when Rainham had finished. "Did the girl seem to know him? Or did he seem to have heard of this Crichton before?"

"No," said Rainham reflectively; "the girl didn't know Oswyn, though, on the other hand, he seemed certain that he had seen her face somewhere—probably in that study of yours, by the way; and he appeared to think that I ought to have heard of Crichton—Cyril Crichton. He told me that the man wrote clever, scurrilous articles on art and the drama for the Outcry. But I don't read English papers much. You see, our difficulty is that Cyril Crichton is obviously a nom de plume, and no one—not even the people at the Outcry office—know, or will say, who the man is; Kitty has tried. I suppose the editor knows all right, but he is discreet."

"Ah!" cried Lightmark. "Now I remember something about her. Have you got your hat? Let's get into a hansom and go and dine—I'm positively starving. I'll stand you a dinner at the Cavour—standing you a dinner will be such a new sensation; and new sensations are the only things worth living for. I will tell you about Kitty in the cab. What a beneficent old beggar you are!"

As they drove rapidly eastward along the High Street of Old Kensington, where the pale orange of the lamplight was just beginning to tell in the dusk, Lightmark explained how, some two years ago or more, he had been talking to a stranger in a railway carriage, and lamenting the difficulty of finding really pretty girls who would act as models; how the stranger had told him that he knew of such a one—a dressmaker's apprentice, or something of that sort, who found the work and hours too hard; and how, finally, Kitty had called at his studio—the old one in Bloomsbury—and had sat to him, perhaps half a dozen times, before vanishing from his knowledge. This account had been freely interspersed with exclamations on the beauty of the evening light in the Park, and the subtle charm of the hour after sunset, more exquisite in the clear atmosphere of Paris, but still sufficiently lovely even in London, and acknowledged by both of them to be one of the few compensations accorded to the dwellers in the much-abused Metropolis.

"I'm sorry," said Rainham penitently; "I had a stupid sort of idea that you were mixed up in the business somehow. I thought so even before I saw the sketch, because I couldn't understand whom else she could have been looking for at the dock. It's very mysterious."

"I shouldn't bother about the girl if I were you," replied the other light-heartedly. "Even if I had been mixed up with her, as you gracefully express it, you wouldn't have anything to do with it. I believe you think I've been playing the devil with her now, you old moralist! Hear me swear, by yon pale—— Dash it! there isn't a moon—well, by the cresset on the top of the Empire, that the young person in question has been my model for a brief space, and nothing more. Only my model in the strictest sense of the word. No, I'll pay the cab for once in a way."

When they had dined, sitting at their favourite table, which, from its position at the end, commanded a view of the bright exotic room, with its cosmopolitan contents, their wants cared for by the head-waiter, who adored Lightmark for his knowledge of his mother-tongue, recognising and being recognised by the forgotten of their acquaintance, who were also dining there, Lightmark proposed an adjournment to the little theatre in Dean Street hard by, where "Niniche" was being played for the last time by a clever company from across the Channel.

"We must go to the theatre," he said, "unless you prefer a hall; I confess I'm sick of them. I haven't satisfied my ideas of extravagance nearly yet. We will go and sit in the stalls at the Royalty and see Jane May and the others; it will remind us of old days."

"But, my dear fellow," expostulated the other, "it's so late, and we're in morning dress. Let's go to-morrow night instead."

"Ah no! to-morrow I sha'n't be in the right mood. Never put off till to-morrow, you know. Our not being in evening dress won't matter a bit, they'll only think we're critics; and 'Niniche' doesn't begin till nine."

On their speedy arrival at the modest portals of the little theatre, Lightmark instructed his companion, with an air of mystery, to wait, and presently emerged, smiling, from a triumphant encounter with the gentleman presiding at the box-office.

"They had no stalls left," he whispered; "but they're going to put us in two chairs at the side."

The house, with the exception of the more popular places, was crowded; and the boisterous absurdity of the farce was at its height. Rainham at first felt quite disconcerted by the proximity of the ludicrous figure in bathing dress who was leaning over the footlights, and declaiming his woes with a directness of appeal to the audience which alone would have marked the nationality of the robust actor, who was creating so much mirth out of the extremely hackneyed situation. He had got into the wrong bathing-machine (Lightmark seemed to find it intensely amusing) and the trousers of the rightful occupant only came down to his knees. Rainham at first was disconcerted, and then he began to feel bored. He fell into a semi-comatose state of contemplation, from which he was only aroused by the cadence on his ear of one of the most charming voices he had ever heard. So he characterized it, to Lightmark's amusement, when they were discussing their cigarettes and the jeune premiere in the interval between the acts.

"Oh for an epithet to describe her!" said Lightmark, catching his friend's enthusiasm. "She isn't exactly pretty—yes, she is pretty, but she isn't beautiful! She's got any amount of what dramatic critics call chic. Don't shudder—I hate the word quite as much as you do, but it was inevitable. The only thing I feel sure about is that she's espiegle, and altogether delightful. And how funny that man is, or would be, if the authors had only given him a better chance! The fun of the piece is like those trousers—it only comes down to his knees."

"What I admire most is her voice," said the other inconsequently. "How is it that French actresses have such beautiful voices? Freedom from fogs can't be the only cause. And it's got all that delicious plaintiveness——"

"Yes," interposed Lightmark, "it's the voice of a true Parisian femme de siecle, fin de siecle. There's the bell, let's go and hear some more of it."

After the second act Lightmark, in whom the influence of the evening was beginning to manifest itself in the shape of a geniality which was absent in a great degree from his more serious hours, and which had undoubtedly won him more friends than the other slightly pugnacious phase of his temperament, decided that Niniche was really very like Miss Sylvester, only less beautiful, and asserted that he was confident that she was younger than the newspapers made out.

Later, before the two friends parted on the steps of the modest club, which included both in its list of town members, Lightmark assumed an air of mystery, sighed once or twice, and looked at his friend with an expression in which forgiveness, reproach, and the lateness of the hour were strangely commingled.

"Old boy," he said, bending his eyebrows with an effort towards gravity, "I'm really rather cut up about that business—you thinking I was playing the gay deceiver, and all that sort of thing, you know. It was unworthy of you, Philip—it was, really. Dash it! I've been in love for ever so long. All the summer, seriously; I'm going to get married—settle down, range myself. Cut all you rips of bachelors.... But perhaps she won't see it. Oh, Lord!... Damn it all. Why don't you congratulate me, eh?"

Rainham was growing more and more serious, and it was with a real heartache and a curious apprehension of a moral blow that he answered, as gaily as he could:

"You're going a little too fast, Dick. If you haven't asked the girl, it's rather too early for congratulations, however irresistible your attractions may be. Who—who is it, Dick?"

"Oh, come, you know well enough. Eve—I wonder if she'll let me call her Eve? Eve! Isn't it a pretty name?"

"I wish you hadn't told me this, Dick," said the other, with more of the familiar weariness in his voice. "Are you sure you mean it? I don't believe you've thought it out. Why, what do you suppose Mrs. Sylvester will say, and Charles Sylvester?"

"You think they won't have anything to do with a poor devil of an artist, I suppose? Right you are, sir; but when the poor devil has a rich and gouty uncle, who is disposed to be friendly.... See? I think that alters the complexion of the case. You know, the Sylvesters are awfully well connected, and so on, but they haven't got much money. Mrs. Sylvester has a life annuity, and Charles—whom I always want to call 'Chawles,' because he's so pompous—has got his professional income. And Eve has got a little, enough to dress her, I should think. 'Payable quarterly on her attaining the age of twenty-one years, or marrying under that age, whichever shall first happen.' I've looked it all up at Somerset House. Last will and testament of Sylvester Charles Sylvester, Esq. I know they're rather ambitious, and wouldn't look at me if it wasn't for the Colonel. But the Colonel is a solid fact, and I've no doubt they think he's richer than he is. And I am making money, though you mightn't think it."

"I don't believe Mrs. Sylvester has thought about it at all," said Rainham doubtfully. "Eve is so young, and young artists are never looked on as marrying men. Take my advice and think about it."

"You call her Eve, do you? Ah, well, I won't be jealous of you, old boy. You shall come to the wedding and be best man; or no, the Colonel will be best man, I suppose? I can imagine him returning thanks for the bridesmaids in the most dazzling white waistcoat that was ever starched. Good-night; see you again soon."

"I don't know how it is," thought Rainham, as he walked up Old Compton Street, on his way to the attic near the British Museum which he rented when he was in England, for use on occasions of this kind. "It's very stupid of me, but I can't bear the idea of Eve marrying. A species of jealousy, I suppose; not ordinary jealousy, of course. And yet why not? I have never thought of her as anything but a child ... why shouldn't Lightmark marry her? Eve's young, and good-looking, and sure to get on; and I'm a selfish old wreck. Yes, he shall marry her, and I will buy his pictures." Still, he shook his head even as he formulated this generous solution of the question, and could not induce himself to regard the position with equanimity, though he sat up till broad daylight wrestling with it. "I wonder if I am in love," he said, with a bitter laugh, as he shook the ashes out of his last pipe.



CHAPTER IX

The upper end of the Park is never so fashionably frequented as its southern regions, and Rainham, whose want of purpose had led him past gay carpet-beds and under branching trees nearly to the Marble Arch, was hardly surprised to recognise among the heterogeneous array of promenaders, tramps, and nursemaids, whom the heat of the slanting sun had prompted to occupy the benches dotted at intervals along the Row, a face whose weary pallor caused him a pang of self-reproach—Kitty!

For the last few days, since his encounter with her portrait at Lightmark's studio, he had scarcely given her troubles a thought. When the girl saw him, after a startled look and movement, she seemed to shrink still further into the folds of her rusty black cloak, and, to avoid meeting Rainham's eyes, bent her head over the child who was seated at her side. He found something irresistibly charming and pathetically generous in the girl's spontaneous denial of any claim to his notice, although, except that he had promised to let her know anything he might learn of the whereabouts of the father of her child, he would have found it hard to establish in the mind of an outside critic that any such claim in fact existed.

"Well, my poor child," he said softly, as he dropped into one of the vacant seats on the same bench, "how goes it with you and the little one?"

"Oh, sir, you shouldn't speak to me—not here. Anyone might see you. Pray go. I know I shall get you into trouble, and you so kind!"

These words were spoken in a rapid, frightened whisper, and with an apprehensive glance at the intermittent stream of carriages passing within a few yards of them. Rainham shrugged his shoulders pitifully, but found it rather difficult to say anything. Certainly, his reputation was running a risk, and he felt that his indifference was somewhat exceptional.

"I'm sorry to say I've got no news for you," he said presently, after a silent pause, during which he had observed that the wide-eyed child was really far prettier than many who (as he had been assured by the complacent matrons who exhibited them) were "little cherubs," and that it was as scrupulously cared for as the little cherubs, even in their exhibition array. "I haven't been able to discover anything; but you mustn't despair, we shall find him sooner or later."

The girl glanced at him irresolutely, and then dropped her eyes again, leaning over the child.

"It's no good, sir," she said. "I'm only sorry to have given you so much trouble already. He won't come back—he's tired of me. He could find me if he wanted to, and watching and hunting for him like this would only set him more and more against me."

Rainham, as he listened to her, rather puzzled by her sudden change of attitude since their last interview, was forced to admit mentally that her reasoning, if it lacked spontaneity, was, at all events, indisputably sound; and while he found himself doubting whether the victim was not better versed in worldliness than he had at first suspected, he still felt a curious reluctance which, though he was half ashamed of his delicacy, prevented him from suggesting that, sentimental reasons apart, the betrayer still ought to be discovered, if only in order to force him to provide for the maintenance of his child. It hardly, perhaps, occurred to him that he, after all, would be the person who would suffer most, and he certainly did not for an instant credit the girl with any ulterior designs upon his purse.

"Oh, I don't know," he said feebly. "Perhaps he does not know where you are. And I dare say, if he saw the child——"

"The child?" echoed the woman bitterly. "That's just the worst of it!"

Rainham sighed, forced again to acknowledge his lower standing in the wisdom of the world. He would have given a great deal to be able to get up and go.

"Then you don't want me to employ a detective, or to advertise, or—or to make an appeal to the editor of the Outcry?"

Mrs. Crichton seemed to welcome the opportunity afforded by this direct questioning.

"No," she said, "I think it would be better not. I don't want to seem ungrateful, sir—and I'm sure I thank you very, very much for all you have done for me—but I think you had better take no more trouble about it. If I can get work I shall do all right."

In spite of the girl's evident attempt to pull herself together, her voice was less brave than her words, and they conveyed but little assurance to the listener. He shrugged his shoulders somewhat impatiently: the interview was beginning to tell upon his nerves.

"Of course, it's for you to decide, and I suppose you have thought it well out, and have good reason for this alteration of purpose. But when you talk about work——?"

He finished his sentence with a note of inquiry and a half apologetic glance at her slight form and frail, white fingers.

"I haven't always been a model," she explained with some dignity. "Would to God I never had! I can sew better than most, and I can work a type-machine. That's what I used to do before he came. But type-writing work isn't so easy to get as it was, and I am out of practice."

It occurred to him for a moment to ask the girl whether she could remember sitting for Mr. Lightmark, but he felt that Dick might resent the introduction of his name; and, remembering that she had told him that, for a time, before her health gave way, her artist patrons had been numerous, he dismissed the idea as not likely to be profitable.

As they spoke, she with her mournful eyes turned on Rainham's sympathetic face, he absently following the movements of the child as it laboriously raised a small edifice of gravel-stones on the seat between them, neither of them noticed the severely correct figure in the frock-coat and immaculate hat who passed close behind with observant eyeglass fixed upon the little group, and with an air which, after the first flush of open-mouthed surprise, was eloquently expressive of regretful indignation and the highest motives.

Charles Sylvester continued his walk for a distance of about fifty paces, and then seated himself in a position to command a view of the persons in whom he was interested.

"I don't like watching Rainham like this," he said to himself; "but it's a duty which I owe to society."

That the man was Rainham was as obvious as that the woman he was talking to was of a far lower rank in life than his own. And then there was the child!

"By Jove!" said Sylvester sententiously, "it's worse than I thought. People really ought to be warned. I suppose it's that girl he was talking about at the studio the other day; and he tried to shift her on to Lightmark. What a hypocrite the man must be!"

He was not, however, for long called upon to maintain, in the interests of society, his position of espionage; for Rainham, warned of the lapse of time by the clock which adorns the Park lodge, presently became aware that, if he was to fulfil his intention of calling on Mrs. Sylvester, he had no time to spare; and when he rose from his seat Charles Sylvester thought it advisable to resume the walk which his zeal had induced him to interrupt.



CHAPTER X

After all, he need not have hurried. Mrs. Sylvester was out, he was told by the butler, who proceeded to suggest, with the freedom of an old friend, that he should make his way upstairs and find Miss Eve.

"Yes, I think I will, Phelps," he said, after a moment's hesitation, "if she is disengaged."

"Miss Eve is in the music-room playing, I think, sir. Will you go up?"

They found the room empty, however, though an open violin-case on the table and a music-stand, on which leaflets of Schubert fluttered fitfully in the light breeze that entered through the open window, testified to its recent occupation.

While the butler left Rainham, with apologies, to make further search, the latter stood, hat in hand, making a survey of the little wainscoted room, which he remembered as the schoolroom. Indeed, though the name, in deference doubtless to Eve's mature age, had been altered, it still retained much of its former aspect. From the little feminine trifles lying about, scraps of unfinished crewel-work and embroidery, and the fresh flowers in the vases, he gathered that it was still an apartment which Eve frequented. He recognised her cage of love-birds hanging in the window; the cottage piano with its frontal of faded silk, on which he could remember her first painful struggles with Czerny and scales; the pictures on the walls, many of them coloured reproductions from the Christmas numbers of the illustrated papers; the ink-stained tablecloth on the round table in the centre. He examined the photographs on the mantelpiece with a smile—Charles in his wig and gown, and Mrs. Sylvester with her pretty, faded face, gazed at each other, with a curious likeness in their disparity, from a double frame in the centre; the spectacled profile of the eminently respectable woman who had superintended Miss Eve's studies held another place of honour; and, opposite, Rainham recognised a faded photograph of himself, taken six years before in Rome. He turned from these to the bookshelves, which seemed to be filled with relegations from the rest of the house—children's story-books in tarnished bright covers and dilapidated school-books. He took down one of these latter and examined it absently, with a half-sigh. He had it still in his hand when the young girl fluttered in, looking very cool and fresh in her plain, white dress with a broad sash of apple-green ribbon.

"I thought you were never coming to see us again, Philip," she said reproachfully, as she held out her little hand to him. "What possessed them to bring you here? It's awfully untidy."

"Phelps had an idea you were making music," he explained; "and, for the untidiness, I suppose he remembered that I was used to it of old."

"Yes, it's just the same. It is an untidiness of years, and it is hopeless to cope with it. What have you got there?"

He turned the book round to acquaint himself.

"Ollendorf's 'Elementary German Grammar,'" he said with a smile; "it's an interesting work."

She made a little moue expressive of disapproval.

"Ah, how nice it is to have done with all that, Philip! You can't believe how glad I am to be 'finished'; yes, I am finished now. I don't even have masters, and Miss Murison has gone away to Brighton and opened a school for young gentlemen. Poor little wretches! how sorry I am for them! Do you remember Miss Murison, Philip?"

She had sunk down into an arm-chair, and Rainham stood, his stooping shoulders propped against the mantelpiece, smiling down at her.

"Yes, I remember Miss Murison; and so you are glad her reign has come to an end, Eve? Well, I suppose it is natural."

She nodded her pretty head.

"Just a little, Philip. But how tired you look! Will you have some tea? I suppose you have just come from Blackpool?"

His face darkened suddenly, and the smile for a moment died away.

"No," he said shortly, "I have been in the Park."

"Well," she remarked after a moment, "you must have some tea, anyhow. Of course you will wait and see mamma; she has gone to the Dollonds' 'at home,' you know. I an all alone. If you like, we will have it in here, as we did in the old days—a regular schoolroom tea."

"It will be charming," said Rainham, seating himself; "it will only want the Murison to complete the illusion."

"Oh, it will do just as well without her," said Eve, laughing; "ring the bell, please."

Rainham sat back watching her with far-away eyes, as she moved lightly about, giving her orders with a childish imperiousness, and setting out the little tea-table between them.

"It is delightful," he said again, when they were once more alone and he had accepted a well-creamed cup and a waferlike tartine; "and I feel as if I had turned back several years. But how is it, by-the-bye, that you have not gone to the Dollonds'?"

She laughed up at him merrily.

"Because I have had much more important things to do. I have been with my dressmaker. I am going to a dance to-night, and I have had a great deal of bother over my new frock. But it is all right now, and I shall wear it to-night; and it is perfectly sweet. Oh, you have never seen me at a party yet, Philip."

"Never? My dear child, I have danced with you at scores."

"Oh yes, at children's parties; but never since I have grown up—'come out,' I mean. Oh, Philip, is there anything in life so delightful as one's first ball? I wish you would come out with us sometimes. I should like to dance with you again now."

"Ah," he said, "my dancing days are over. I am a wallflower, Eve, now; and my only use at balls is to fetch and carry for the chaperons."

"Philip!" she cried reproachfully, "what a dreadful thing to say! Besides, you used to dance so splendidly."

"Did I?" he asked; "I expect you would be less lenient now. Yes, I will have another cup, please."

She filled it, and he took it from her in silence, wondering how he could least obtrusively gain the knowledge of her mind he sought. He had said to himself that if he could find her alone, it would be so easy; just a word, an accent, would tell him how far she really cared. But now that she was actually with him, it had become strangely difficult. Very sadly he reflected that she had grown out of his knowledge; away from her, she rested in his memory as a child whom he could help. The actual presence of this young girl with the deep eyes, in the first flush of her womanhood, corrected him; an intolerable weight sealed his tongue, forbidding him to utter Lightmark's name, greatly as he desired. He racked himself for delicate circumlocutions, and it was only at last, by a gigantic effort, when he realized that the afternoon waned, while he wasted an unique occasion in humorous commonplace, that he broke almost brutally into Eve's disquisitions on her various festivities to ask, blushing like a girl, if Lightmark's picture progressed.

"I have had only a few sittings," she admitted, "and I expect they will be the last here. Perhaps they will be continued abroad. You know Mr. Lightmark is going to meet us in Switzerland, perhaps."

"You will like that?" suggested Rainham gravely.

She looked into her cup, beating a tattoo on the carpet with her little foot nervously.

"Yes," she said, after a minute, "I think so."

There was nothing in her words, her tone, to colour this bare statement of a simple fact. Only a second later, as if in a sudden need of confidence, a resumption of her old childish habit towards him, she raised her eyes to his, and in their clear, gray depths, before they drooped again beneath the long lashes, he read her secret. No words could have told him more plainly that she loved Lightmark—that Dick had merely to speak. Their silence only lasted a moment; but it seemed to Rainham, who had not shifted his position or moved a muscle, that it stretched over an interminable space of time. It was curiously intangible, and yet even then he realized that it would remain with its least accessories in his mind one of those trivial, indelible photographs which last a lifetime. The smell of mignonette that spread in from the window-box through the turquoise-blue Venetian blinds; the chattering of the love-birds; the strains of a waltz of Waldteufel's floating up from a German band in the street below—they ran into a single sensation that was like the stab of cold steel. He sat staring blankly at the tattered bookshelves, playing mechanically with his teaspoon; and presently he became aware that the young girl was talking, was telling him the route they should take next week, and the name of the hotel they were going to at Basel.

"Yes," he hazarded, and "Yes," and "Yes," his smiling lips belying the lassitude of his eyes. Actually, he looked out and beyond her, at another Eve, to whom he now paid his adieux. It was the dainty little figure of her childish self which he saw, with its bright, long hair, and its confiding eyes, and its caressing little ways, in the deepening shadows between the bookshelves—and for the last time. It vanished like a shadow, smiling mockingly, and he knew it would never return. In its place abode henceforth the image of this stately maiden, comely and desirable, with the profound eyes which lighted up—for Dick. An unaccountable sense of failure stole over Rainham—unaccountable because he could lay his finger upon no tangible cause of his discomfiture.



CHAPTER XI

The little town was brilliant with September sunshine; the blue smoke spired almost unbroken into the bluer vault above, and the cream-coloured facades of the houses, with their faded blue shutters and verandas, the gay striped awnings of the little fleet of rowing boats, the gray of the stone parapet, and the dull green of the mountainous opposite shore, were mirrored steeply in the bight of narrowing, sunlit lake. The wide, dusty esplanade was almost empty, except at the corners, where voluble market women gossiped over their fruit-baskets, heaped with purple-brown figs, little mountain-born strawberries, sweet, watery grapes, green almonds, and stupendous pears. At rare intervals a steamboat, bright and neat as a new toy, trailed a long feather of smoke from the foot of the Rigi, shed a small and dusty crowd into the sleepy town, and then bustled back, shearing the silken flood and strangely distorting its reflections.

"The worst of Lucerne," said Mrs. Sylvester—"the worst of Lucerne is that one can't escape from Mount Pilatus and the Lion. The inhabitants all think that Pilatus regulates the weather, and they would certainly give their Lion the preference over the Venus of Milo."

They were all sitting on the terrace in front of the Schweitzerhof; Lady Garnett and Mary, Mrs. Sylvester and Eve. Lady Garnett and her companion were but newly arrived, and, as birds of passage, preferred the hotel to a pension. The Sylvesters had been staying in the quaint, rambling town for nearly a fortnight. It was their usual summer resort, and although the spring of each year found them deciding to go elsewhere for a change, in the end they nearly always proved faithful to the familiar lake. Their pension—they regarded it almost as a country house—was such an inducement! The Pension Bungay was maintained by an old servant of the family, who, when he began to find the duties of butler too exacting for his declining years, gave a warning, which applied also to one of his fellow-servants, the cook, to wit, a lady of Continental origin, who had consented to become Madame Bungay; and the pair, having souls above public-houses, and relying on their not inconsiderable connection among the servants of Mayfair, had boldly and successfully launched into an independent career as sole proprietors and managers of the Pension Bungay, Lucerne.

"Yes," said Lady Garnett sympathetically; "I suppose Pilatus is rather monotonous. It's rather too near, I think. It ought to be far away, and covered with snow, more like the Jungfrau, which we have been worshipping at Interlaken, where, by the way, there are positively more Americans than natives."

"Oh," Mrs. Sylvester chimed in, "isn't it dreadful the way they overrun Europe nowadays! There are two American families staying at our pension, and you see them everywhere."

"I think I rather like them. They amuse me, you know, and somehow, though it may be disloyal for me, as a naturalized Englishwoman, to say so, as a rule they comport themselves much better than the ordinary British tourist. Of course, the country is not so accessible for the Americans; it's out of the reach of their cheap excursionists. But how opportune that curious tower is, and the bridge! of course, it's correct to admire them?"

Mary Masters and Eve, who had been quietly discussing chiffons, got up from their chairs with a preconcerted air.

"We are so tired of sitting still," said the former, balancing herself with an air of indecision, and giving Mrs. Sylvester time to note the admirable taste of her simple, maize-coloured travelling dress, which did not suffer from contrast with the younger girl's brighter and more elaborately charming toilette. "Miss Sylvester wants to show me the uncatchable trout in the lake, and I want to go and see if the salon is empty, so that I can try the piano; and we can't decide which to do. I suppose, Mrs. Sylvester, that the hotel is more within the bounds of propriety?"

"Oh, well," said Eve, laughing, "I don't care; anyhow, let's go and find the piano. Only, there is sure to be some one there already."

"By the way," said Lady Garnett, when the girls had vanished into the building, "of course you know that Philip Rainham's friend—the young man who paints and has a moustache, I mean—is here, or will be very shortly? He was staying at our hotel at Berne."

"Mr. Lightmark, I suppose?" answered the other, without showing her surprise except in her eyes. "We told him that we were coming to Lucerne, and it was more or less arranged."

"Ah, yes," interposed Lady Garnett; "am I indiscreet in suggesting an exceptional attraction?"

Mrs. Sylvester merely looked mysterious, and Lady Garnett was encouraged to continue.

"Your daughter is very beautiful. This Mr. Lightmark has been painting her portrait, n'est ce pas? I should think it ought to be a success. Am I to congratulate him?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Sylvester hurriedly, "dear Lady Garnett, it hasn't gone so far as that."

"The portrait?" murmured the other innocently. "Ah, I'm afraid you misunderstood me."

Mrs. Sylvester cast a meaning glance in the direction of Eve, who, sauntering along the terrace with Mary, was now behind their seat, and the conversation, which promised to become interesting, dropped, while Mary explained that they had found the music-stool occupied by a lady, who was superfluously protesting her inability to sing "the old songs"—the person who always did monopolize hotel pianos, as Mary laughingly asserted.

Two days later Lightmark presented himself at the Pension Bungay. He had come to Lucerne with the fixed purpose of definitely proposing marriage to Eve. He was far too worldly-wise to fail to perceive that, so far at least, Mrs. Sylvester had certainly taken no trouble to discourage his pretensions. His attentions, he argued, had been by no means obscure; his studio had been singularly honoured by the presence of Miss Sylvester and her mother, for the purposes of the portrait; he had even been granted a sitting at the house in Park Street, when a less rigid supervision had been exercised, and when, in the absence of the mother, he had been able to assure himself that the girl was far from despising his adoration. Before leaving town he had dined with his uncle, the Colonel, at his club, and the veteran had spontaneously and strenuously urged the step, and even thrown out promising hints as to settlements. He broke in upon the little circle at the hour of afternoon tea, and Eve found his gray travelling suit, and the bronze of his complexion, exceedingly becoming. He announced that he had come to stay for a week or two; he was going to make some sketches, and he couldn't tear himself away from that delightful bridge, and his lodgings!

"My dear fellow," he said to Charles Sylvester, with an air of familiarity which gave one an insight as to the advance the artist had made in his relations with the family, "you must come and see my diggings. The most delightful old hostelry in Europe. Built straight up out of the lake, like the castle of Chillon. It's called the Gasthof zum Pfistern. I could fish out of my bedroom window. I assure you, it's charming. You must come and dine with me there. I hope you ladies will so far honour me?"

This project, however, fell through, and by way of compensation Lightmark and Charles enjoyed the privilege of entertaining the party, including Lady Garnett and Miss Masters, at Borghoni's; after which the younger people chartered a boat, and floated idly about the star-reflecting lake, while the dowagers maintained a discreet surveillance from their seat on the esplanade.

Of this last incident it may be said that Lightmark and Eve found it altogether delightful, the latter especially being struck by the romance of the situation; while Charles was inclined to be ponderously sentimental, and Miss Masters afterwards confessed to having felt bored.

In the course of the next day Lightmark had the privilege of a confidential interview with the mother of his adored. Mrs. Sylvester had fully armed herself for the occasion, and presented an edifying example of matronly affection and prudence.

"Of course, I was not altogether unprepared for this, Mr. Lightmark. In fact, I may as well own that I have talked it over with my son, and we agreed that the whole question resolved itself into—ah—into settlements. You must not think me mercenary." This was said with a dignified calm, which made the idea preposterous. "If you can"—here she seemed to refer to some mental note-book—"ah—satisfy Charles on that point, I am sure that it will give me great pleasure to regard you as a prospective son-in-law. Of course, you know, I can't answer for Eve, or Charles."

"Ah, my dear lady," said the other, gracefully overwhelmed, "if I may count on your good offices I am very fortunate."

That evening, as the two men sat discussing their cigars and coffee, Lightmark listened with wonderful patience to a disquisition on the subject of—he couldn't afterwards remember whether it was Strikes or the Sugar Bounty. He was rather afraid of the necessary interview with Charles. It would require some tact, and he was prepared to find him unpleasantly exacting as arbiter of his pecuniary status.

"You ought to be in the House, by Jove! that's your line, Sylvester, with a clever wife, you know, to do the canvassing for you" ("and write your speeches," he mentally added).

The other owned that he had thought of it.

"But the wife," he added, with an attempt at levity, "that's the difficulty!"

And the connection of a subsequent remark with this topic, though some conversation intervened, did not escape his astute companion, and he was careful to sing Miss Masters' praises with an absence of allusiveness, which showed the actor. Then he threw away the stump of his cigar, and mentally braced himself.

"You have seen a good deal of me lately," he said. "I want to ask you if you have any objection to me as a possible brother-in-law; in fact, I want to marry your sister."

"Yes?" said the other encouragingly.

"I have, as you may know, spoken to Mrs. Sylvester about it, and I believe she will—that is to say, I think she has no personal objection to me."

"Oh, of course, my dear fellow, my mother and I are flattered, quite flattered; but you will understand our anxiety that we should run no risk of sacrificing any of the advantages she has enjoyed hitherto. May I ask, er——"

"What is my income from all sources?" suggested Lightmark rather flippantly. "Well, I have to confess that my profession, in which I am said to be rising, brings me in about four hundred and fifty a year, in addition to which I have a private income, which amounts to, say, three hundred; total, seven hundred and fifty." Then, seeing that Charles looked grave, he played his trump card: "And I ought to add that my uncle, the Colonel, you know, has been good enough to talk about making me an allowance, on my marrying with his approval. In fact he is, I believe, prepared to make a settlement on my marriage with your sister."

Charles Sylvester pronounced himself provisionally satisfied, and it was arranged that he should communicate with Colonel Lightmark, and that meanwhile the engagement should not be made public.

Eve was standing on the little balcony, appertaining to the sitting-room which had been dedicated to the ladies as a special mark of favour by the proprietor of the pension, and Lightmark hastened to join her there; and while Charles and his mother played a long game of chess, the two looked out at the line of moonlit Alps, and were sentimentally and absurdly happy.

"Mrs. Sylvester," said Lightmark, when that lady thought it advisable to warn her daughter that there was a cold wind blowing off the lake, "we have arranged that a certain portrait shall figure in the Academy catalogue next spring as 'Portrait of the Artist's Wife.'"

After which Mrs. Sylvester began to call him Richard, and Charles became oppressively genial: a development which led the embarrassed recipient of these honours to console himself by reflecting that, after all, he was not going to marry the entire family.

"Ma cherie," said Lady Garnett, as the Paris train steamed out of Lucerne on the afternoon of the next day but one, "do you know that I feel a sensation of positive relief at getting away from those people? Eve is very gentille, but lovers are so uninteresting, when they are properly engaged; and the excellent Charles! My child, I am afraid you have been very cruel."

"Cruel, aunt?" said Mary, with a demure look of astonishment. "I like Eve very much, and I suppose Mr. Lightmark must be nice, because he's such a friend of Philip's. But I don't quite like the way he talks about Philip, and ... he's very clever."

"Yes," said the old lady drowsily; "he's cleverer than Philip."

"He may be cleverer, but——" Mary began with some warmth, and paused.

Her companion opened her eyes widely, and darted a keen glance at the girl. Then, settling herself into her corner:

"My dear child, to whom do you say it?"

It was eminently characteristic of Lady Garnett that, even when she was sleepy, she understood what people were going to say long before the words were spoken, and, especially with her familiars, she had a habit of taking her anticipations as realized.

Mary found something embarrassing in the humour of the old lady's expression, and devoted herself to gazing out of the window at the mountain-bound landscape, in which houses, trees, and cattle all seemed to be in miniature, until the sound of regular breathing assured her that the inquisitive eyes were closed.



CHAPTER XII

During the long, hot August, which variously dispersed the rest of their acquaintances, the intimacy of that ill-assorted couple, the bird of passage Rainham, and Oswyn the artist, was able to ripen. They met occasionally at Brodonowski's, of which dingy restaurant they had now almost a monopoly; for its artistic session had been prorogued, and the "boys" were scattered, departing one by one, as their purses and inclinations prompted, to resume acquaintance with their favourite "bits" in Cornwall, or among the orchards and moors of Brittany, to study mountains in sad Merioneth, or to paint ocean rollers and Irish peasants in ultimate Galway. On the occasion of their second meeting, Rainham having (a trifle diffidently, for the painter was not a questionable man) evinced a curiosity as to his summer movements, Oswyn had scornfully repudiated such a notion.

"Thank God!" he cried, "I have outworn that mania of searching for prettiness. London is big enough for me. My work is here, and the studies I want are here, and here I stay till the end of all things. I hate the tame country faces, the aggressive stillness and the silent noise, the sentiment and the sheep of it. Give me the streets and the yellow gas, the roar of the City, smoke, haggard faces, flaming omnibuses, parched London, and the river rolling oilily by the embankment like Styx at night when the lamps shine."

He drew in a breath thirstily, as though the picture were growing on canvas before him.

"Well, if you want river subjects you must come and find them at Blackpool," said Rainham; and Oswyn had replied abruptly that he would.

And he kept his word, not once but many times, dropping down on Rainham suddenly, unexplainedly, after his fashion, as it were from the clouds, in the late afternoon, when the clerks had left. He would chat there for an hour or two in his spasmodic, half-sullen way, in which, however, an increasing cordiality mingled, making, before he retired once more into space, some colour notes of the yard or the river, or at times a rough sketch, which was never without its terse originality.

Rainham began to look forward to these visits with a recurring pleasure. Oswyn's beautiful genius and Oswyn's savage humours fascinated him, and no less his pleasing, personal ambiguity. He seemed to be a person without antecedents, as he was certainly without present ties. Except that he painted, and so must have a place to paint in, he might have lodged precariously in a doss-house, or on door-steps, or under the Adelphi arches with those outcasts of civilization to whom, in personal appearance, one might not deny he bore a certain resemblance. To no one did he reveal his abiding-place, and it was the merest tradition of little authority that a man from Brodonowski's had once been taken to his studio. By no means a perspicuous man, and to be approached perhaps charily; yet Rainham, as his acquaintance progressed, found himself from time to time brought up with a certain surprise, as he discovered, under all his savage cynicism, his overweening devotion to a depressing theory, a very real vein of refinement, of delicate mundane sensibility, revealed perhaps in a chance phrase or diffidence, or more often in some curiously fine touch to canvas of his rare, audacious brush. The incongruities of the man, his malice, his coarseness, his reckless generosity, gave Rainham much food for thought. And, indeed, that parched empty August seemed full of problematical issues; and he had, on matters of more import than the enigmatic mind of a new friend, to be content at last to be tossed to and fro on the winds of vain conjecture.

Lightmark and the Sylvesters occupied him much; but beyond a brief note from Mrs. Sylvester in Lucerne, which told him nothing that he would know, there came to him no news from Switzerland. In the matter of the girl whom he had befriended, recklessly, he told himself at times, difficulties multiplied. A sort of dumb devil seemed to have entered into her, and, with the best will in the world, it was a merely pecuniary assistance which he could give her, half angry with himself the while that his indolent good nature (it appeared to him little else) forbade him to cast back at her what seemed a curious ingratitude almost passing the proverbial feminine perversity, and let her go her own way as she would have it. On two occasions, since that chance meeting in the Park, he had called at the lodging in which he had helped her to install herself; and from the last he had come away with a distinct sense of failure. Something had come between them, an alien influence was in the air, and the mystery which surrounded the girl, he saw with disappointment, she would not of her own accord assist to dissipate. And yet there was nothing offensive in her attitude, only it had changed, lacked frankness.

One afternoon, finding that he could leave the dock early, he made another effort. He stopped before one in a dingy row of small houses, uniformly depressing, in a street that ran into the Commercial Road, and rang the bell, which tinkled aggressively. A slatternly woman, with a bandage round her head and an air of drunken servility, responded to his inquiry for "Mrs. Crichton" by ushering him into a small back parlour, in which a pale girl in black sat with her head bent over a typewriter. She rose, as he came in, a little nervously, and stood, her thin hands clasped in front of her, looking up at him with expectant, terrified eyes.

"I am sorry to alarm you," he said stiffly. "I came to see if I could do anything for you, and to tell you once more that I can do nothing for you unless you are open with me, unless you help me."

The woman looked away to where the child sat, in a corner of the small room, playing with some disused cotton reels.

"You are very kind, sir," she said in a low, uneasy voice; "but I want nothing, we want very little, the child and I; and with what your kindness in getting me the machine helps us to, we have enough."

"You don't want to be reinstated, to get back your lover, to have your child acknowledged?"

The girl flushed; her hands, which were still locked together, trembled a little.

"I don't want for nothing, sir, except to be left alone."

Then she added, looking him straight in the face now, with a certain rude dignity:

"I wouldn't seem ungrateful, sir, for your great kindness. I think you are the best man I ever met. Oh, believe me, I am not ungrateful, sir! But it is no good, not a scrap, though once I thought it. We must get along as we can now, the child and I—shame and all."

She sighed, gazed intently for a silent minute at the keys of the elaborate machine before her, and then continued, speaking very slowly, as if she were afraid of drawing too largely on her newly-found candour.

"Why should I keep it from you? It makes me feel a liar every time I see you. I will be quite plain with you, sir; perhaps the truth's best, though it's hard enough. I've seen him; that's why I couldn't tell you any more. And it's all over and done, and God help us! We must make the best of it. You see, sir, he is married," said the girl, with a sharp intonation in her voice like a sob.

Rainham had sunk into a chair wearily; he looked up at her now, drawing a long breath, which, for some reason he could not analyse, was replete with relief.

"Married?" he ejaculated; "are you sure?"

"Sure enough," said Kitty Crichton. "He told me so."

"Do you care for this fellow?" he asked curiously after a while.

The flush on her face had faded into two hectic spots on either cheek; there was a lack of all animation in her voice, whether of hope or indignation; she had the air of a person who gave up, who was terribly tired of things.

"Care?" she echoed. "I don't rightly know, sir; I think it's all dead together—love and anger, and my good looks and all. I care for the child, and I don't want to harry or hunt him down for the sake of what has been,—that's all."

He regarded her with the same disinterested pity which had seized him when he saw her first. There were only ruins of a beauty that must have once been striking. As he watched her a doubt assailed him, whether, after all, he had not been deceived by a bare resemblance; whether, in effect, she had ever been actually identical with that brilliant Pierrette whose likeness had so amazed him in Lightmark's rooms.

"By the way," he asked suddenly, "you told me you have been a model: did—was this man a painter? Has he ever painted you?"

The girl fell back a step or two irresolutely.

"Ah! why do you trouble so? What does it matter?" Then she added faintly, but hurriedly stumbling over her words:

"He wasn't a painter—only for amusement; he didn't exhibit. He was a newspaper writer. But he couldn't get work, and got a place in a foreign-going steamer, to keep accounts, I think. That was afterwards, and that's why I looked for him at your dock. They told me the ship had been there, but it wasn't true. Ah! let me be, sir, let me be!"

She broke off hastily, clasping her hands across her breast.

The story, though incoherent, was possible; Rainham could see no motive for her deceiving him, and yet he believed she was lying. He merely shrugged his shoulders, with a rising lassitude. He seemed to have been infected by her own dreariness, to labour under a disability of doing or saying any more; he, too, gave it up. He wanted to get away out of the dingy room; its rickety table and chairs, its two vulgar vases on the stained mantel, its gross upholstery, seemed too trenchantly sordid in the strong August sun. The child's golden head—she was growing intelligent now, and strong on her legs—was the one bright spot in the room. He stopped to pat it with a great pity, a sense of too much pathos in things flooding him, before he passed out again into the mean street.



CHAPTER XIII

September set in cold, with rain and east winds, and Rainham, a naturally chilly mortal, as he handed his coat to Lady Garnett's butler, and followed him into the little library, where dinner was laid for three, congratulated himself that a seasonable fire crackled on the large hearth.

"I hardly expected you back yet," he remarked, after the first greetings, stretching out his hands to the blaze; "and your note was a welcome surprise. I almost think we are the only people in town."

Lady Garnett shrugged her shoulders with a gesture of rich tolerance, as one who acknowledged the respectability of all tastes, whilst preferring her own.

"London has its charm, to me," she remarked. "We are glad to be back. I am getting too old to travel—that terrible crossing, and the terrible people one meets!"

Rainham smiled with absent sympathy, looking into the red coals.

"You must remember, I don't know where you have been. Tell me your adventures and your news."

"I leave that to Mary, my dear," said the old lady.

And at that moment the girl came in, looking stately and older than her age in one of the dark, high-cut dresses which she affected. She shook hands with Rainham, smiling; and as they went to table he repeated his question.

"It is difficult," she said; "we seem to have been everywhere. Oh, we have been very restless this year, Philip. I think we were generally in the train. We tried Trouville——"

"Detestable!" put in Lady Garnett with genial petulance; "it was too small. Half the world was crowded into it; and it was precisely the half-world——"

"I can imagine it," interrupted Rainham, with his grave smile; "and then?"

"Then we thought of Switzerland," continued the young girl. "We went to Geneva. We were almost dead when we arrived, because we had to go a very roundabout way to avoid Paris; we could not go to Paris, because we were afraid of seeing the Republic. It was very hot in Geneva. No place ever was so hot before. We lay on the sofa for three days, and then we were strong enough to run away."

"It was purgatorial!" said the elder lady; "it was full of English governesses and Swiss pastors."

"Then we went to look for cool places, and we had a charming week at Interlaken, and looked longingly at the Jungfrau, and contemplated the ascent."

Lady Garnett laughed her quaint, little laugh.

"Interlaken might have sufficed, my dear; but, unfortunately—it was one of Mary's ridiculous economies—we went to a pension; and we fell into the hands of an extraordinary woman with a fringe and a Bible, a native of North America, who endeavoured to persuade me that I was a Jewess."

"No, no!" laughed Mary, "not quite so bad as that. It was one of the other tribes she would have us belong to—one of the lost tribes. It was not personal."

"Ah, Dieu merci! if they are lost," ejaculated her aunt; "but you are wrong; it was most personal, Mary."

"I will do her the justice to add that she only suggested it once," continued the girl with a smile of elision. "However, we had to flee from her; and so we came to Lucerne."

"That was worst of all," said Lady Garnett, arching her delicate eyebrows; "it was full of lovers."

The solemn butler had placed a pair of obdurate birds before Rainham, which engrossed him; presently he looked up, remarking quietly:

"Did you see the Sylvesters?"

"Ah yes! we saw the Sylvesters; we walked with the Sylvesters; we drank tea with the Sylvesters; we made music with the Sylvesters; we went on the lake with the Sylvesters. That handsome artist, Mr. Lightmark, is it not, Mary? was there, making the running with Miss Eve. The marriage seems to be arranged."

She shrugged her shoulders; the precise shade of meaning in the gesture escaped Rainham; he looked over to Mary inquiringly.

"They seem very much attached to each other," she remarked.

"Oh, they were imbecile!" added Lady Garnett; "try the Moselle, my dear, and leave that terrible sweet stuff to Mary. Yes, I was glad to come away from Lucerne. Everything is very bad now except my Constant's vol-au-vent, which you don't seem to have tried; but lovers are the worst of all. Though I like that young man, Lightmark; he is a type that interests me; he seems——"

She looked round the room vaguely, as if the appropriate word might be lurking in some angle of the apartment; finally, the epithet proving difficult, she abandoned the search.

"Il ira loin!" she said tersely; "he flatters me discreetly, as they did when I was young, before the Republic."

The silent, well-trained man handed round caviare and olives; Mary trifled with some grapes, her brow knitted a little, thoughtfully. Lady Garnett poured herself a glass of maraschino. When they were left alone, the girl remarked abruptly:

"I am not sure whether I quite like Mr. Lightmark; he does not seem to me sincere."

Lady Garnett lifted up her hands.

"Why should he be, my dear? sincerity is very trying. A decent hypocrisy is the secret of good society. Your good, frank people are very rude. If I am a wicked old woman, it is nobody's business to tell me so but my director's."

Mary had risen, and had come over to the old lady's side.

"But then, you are not a wicked old woman, my aunt," she observed gently.

"Ah!" she threw back, "how do you judge? Do me the justice to believe, cherie, that, if I tell you a good deal, there is a good deal, happily, which I don't tell you."

She pushed a box of cigarettes, which the man had placed on the table, toward Rainham. He took one and lit it silently, absently, without his accustomed protests; the girl looked up smiling.

"That means that you want your tete-a-tete, Aunt Marcelle? I know the signal. Well, I will leave you. I want to try over that new march of Liszt's; and I expect, by the time I have grappled with it, you will be coming up for your coffee."

"You are a good girl," answered the elder lady, stroking her hand. "Yes, run away and make music! When Philip and I have had enough scandal and frivolity, we will come and find you; and you shall play us a little of that strange person Wagner, who fascinates me, though you may not believe it."

It was a habit of the house, on occasion of these triangular dinner-parties, that Lady Garnett should remain with Rainham in the interval which custom would have made him spend solitary over his wine. It was a habit which Mary sacredly respected, although it often amused her; and she knew it was one which her aunt valued. And, indeed, though the two made no movement, and for a while said nothing, there was an air of increased intimacy, if it were only in their silence, when the door had closed on the girl and left them together. Presently Lady Garnett began holding up her little glass of crystal maraschino that vied in the light of the candelabra with the diamonds on her fingers.

"I had a conversation with that wearisome young man Charles Sylvester at Lucerne, Philip; he tried to sound me as to Mary's prospects and the state of her affections."

Rainham looked up with quiet surprise.

"Do you mean to say——?" he queried.

"It is very obvious," she answered quickly; "I saw it long ago. But don't imagine that he got much out of me. I was as deep as a well. But what do you think of it?"

"I hope they will be happy," he answered absently. She arched her expressive brows, and he coloured, recollected himself. "I beg your pardon," he said hastily; "I confess I was thinking of something else. You were talking of Mary; why should it not do? Does she care about him?"

His companion laughed, and her laugh had more than its wonted suggestion of irony.

"My dear Philip, for a clever man you can be singularly dense! Care for him! of course she does not."

"She might do worse," he said; "Sylvester is not very bright, but he works hard, and will succeed after a fashion. His limitations dovetail conveniently with his capacities. What do you intend to do?"

"Do I ever interfere in these things? My dear, you are remarkably dull to-night. I never make marriages, nor prevent them. With all my faults, match-making is not one of them. I think too ill of life to try and arrange it. You must admit," she added, "that, long as I have known you, I have never tried to marry you?"

"Ah, that would have been too fatuous!" he remarked lightly.

They were both silent for a while, regarding each other disinterestedly; they appeared to be following a train of thought which led no whither; presently Lady Garnett asked:

"Are you going abroad this year?"

"Yes," he said, "as soon as I can—about the middle of October; to Mentone or Bordighera, I suppose."

"Do you find them interesting? Do they do you much good?"

He smiled rather listlessly, ignoring her second question.

"I confess," he said, "it becomes rather a bore. But, I suppose, at my time of life one finds nothing very interesting. The mere act of living becomes rather a bore after a time."

"I wonder what you are thinking about, Philip?" she asked meditatively; "something has annoyed you to-night; I wonder if you are going to tell me."

He laughed.

"Do we ever tell each other our annoyances? I think we sit and look at each other, and discover them. That is much more appropriate."

"You take things too seriously," she went on; "my dear, they are really not worth it. That is my settled conviction."

She sat and sipped her liqueur appreciatively, smiling good-humouredly, and Philip could not help regarding her with a certain admiration. Her small, sharp, subtile face, beneath its mask of smiling indifference, looked positively youthful in the judicious candle-light; only the little, bird-like, withered hands bore the stigmata of age. And he could not conceive her changing; to the last, those tell-tale hands apart, she would be comely and cynical, and would die as she had lived, secure "in the high places of laughter"—a laughter that, for all its geniality, struck him at times as richly sardonic—in the decent drapery of her fictitious youth; in a decorous piety, yet a little complicated, in the very reception of the last rites, by the amiable arching of her expressive eyebrows.

"You are wonderful," he exclaimed, after an interval, "wonderful; that was what I was thinking."

She smiled disinterestedly.

"Because you don't understand me? My dear, nothing is so easy as mystification; that is why I don't return the compliment. Yourself, you know, are not very intelligible to-night."

He looked away frowning, but without embarrassment; presently throwing up his hands with a little mock gesture of despair, he remarked:

"I should be delighted to explain myself, but I can't. I am unintelligible to myself also; we must give it up, and go and find Mary."

"Ah no! let us give it up, by all means; but we will not join Mary yet; smoke another cigarette."

He took one and lit it, absently, in the blue flame of the spirit-lamp, and she watched him closely with her bright, curious eyes.

"You know this Mr. Lightmark very well, don't you, Philip?"

"Intimately," he answered, nodding.

"You must be pleased," she said. "It is a great match for him, a struggling artist. Can he paint, by the way?"

"He has great talent." He held his cigarette away from him, considered the ash critically. "Yes, he can certainly paint. I suppose it is a good thing—and for Eve, too. Why should it not be?"

"He is a charming young man"—she spoke judicially—"charming! But in effect Mary was quite right; she generally is—he is not sincere."

"I think you are wrong," said Rainham after a moment. "I should be sorry to believe you were not, for the little girl's sake. And I have known him a long time; he is a good fellow at bottom."

"Ah!" cried Lady Garnett with a little, quick gesture of her right hand, "that is precisely what he is not. He exaggerates; he must be very secret; no one ever was so frank as he seems to be."

"Why are you saying all this to me?" the other asked after a moment. "You know I should be very sorry; but what can I do? it's arranged."

"I think you might have prevented it, if you had cared; but, as you say, it is too late now."

"There was no way possible in which I could have prevented it," he said slowly, after an interval which seemed to strike them both as ponderous.

"That was an admission I wanted," she flashed back. "You would have prevented it—you would have given worlds to have prevented it."

His retort came as quickly, accented by a smile:

"Not a halfpenny. I make no admissions; and I have not the faintest idea of what you are driving at. I am a pure spectator. To quote yourself, I don't make marriages, nor mar them; I think too ill of life."

"Ah no!" she said; "it is that you are too indolent; you disappoint me."

"It is you, dear lady, who are inconsistent," he cried, laughing.

"No, you disappoint me," she resumed; "seriously, my dear, I am dissatisfied with you. You will not assert yourself; you do nothing; you have done nothing. There never was a man who made less of his life."

He protested laughingly:

"I have had no time; I have been looking after my lungs."

"Ah, you are incorrigible," she exclaimed, rising; "let us go and find Mary. I give you up; or, rather, I give myself up, as an adviser. For, after all, you are right—there is nothing worth doing in this bad world except looking after one's lung, or whatever it may be."

"Perhaps not even that," said Philip, as he followed her from the room; "even that, after a time, becomes monotonous."



CHAPTER XIV

It occurred to Lightmark one evening, as he groped through the gloom of his studio, on his way to bed, after assisting at a very charming social gathering at the Sylvesters', that as soon as he was married he would have to cut Brodonowski's. The reasons he gave himself were plausible enough, and, indeed, he would have found himself the only Benedict among this horde of wild bachelors. The informal circle was of such recent association that, so far, no precedent for matrimony had occurred, and it was more than doubtful how the experiment might be received. In any case, he told himself, he could not be expected to introduce people like Oswyn and McAllister to his wife—or, rather, to Mrs. Sylvester's daughter. Oswyn was plainly impossible, and McAllister's devotion to tobacco so inordinate that it had come to be a matter of common belief that he smoked short pipes in his sleep.

Then he had dismissed the subject; the long, pleasant holiday in Switzerland intervened, and it was only on his return, late in the autumn, that the question again presented itself, as he turned from the threshold of the house in Park Street, where he had been dining, and half unconsciously took the familiar short cut towards Turk Street. He paused for a deliberate instant when he had hailed the first passing hansom, and then told the man to drive to Piccadilly Circus.

"I must go there a few times more, if only to break it off gently," he reflected, "and I want to see old Rainham. It is stupid of me not to have written to him—yes, stupid! Wonder if he has heard? I mustn't give him up, at any rate. We'll—we'll ask him to dinner, and all that sort of thing. And what the deuce am I going to send to the Academy? Thank goodness, I have enough Swiss sketches to work up for the other galleries to last me for years. But the Academy——"

Then he lost himself in contemplative enjoyment of the familiar vista of Regent Street, the curved, dotted lines of crocus-coloured lamps, fading in the evening fog, the flitting, ruby-eyed cabs, and the calm, white arc-lights, set irregularly about the circus, dulling the grosser gas. He owned to himself that he had secretly yearned for London; that his satisfaction on leaving the vast city was never so great as his joy on again setting foot upon her pavements.

The atmosphere of the long, low room, with its anomalous dark ceiling and grotesquely-decorated walls, was heavily laden with the incense of tobacco and a more subtile odour, which numbered among its factors whisky and absinthe. The slippered, close-cropped waiter, who, by popular report, could speak five languages, and usually employed a mixture of two or three, was still clearing away the debris of protracted dinners; and a few men sat about, in informal groups, playing dominoes, chatting, or engrossed in their Extra Specials. The fire shone cheerfully beneath the high mantel, and the pleasant lamplight lent a mellow glow, which was vaguely suggestive of Dutch interiors, as it flickered on the dark wooden floor, and glanced from the array of china on the dresser in the corner.

When Lightmark entered, closing the door briskly on the foggy, chill October night, he was greeted warmly and demonstratively. The fraternity which made Brodonowski's its head-quarters generously admired his genius, and, for the most part, frankly envied his good-fortune. The younger men respected him as a man who had seen life; and the narratives with which he occasionally favoured them produced in such of his hearers feelings very different to those which older men, like Oswyn, expressed by a turn of the eyebrow or a shrug. They were always ready enough to welcome him, to gather round him, and to drink with him; and this, perhaps, expresses the limits of their relation.

"Lightmark, by Jove!" cried one of them, waving his pipe in the air, as the new-comer halted in the low doorway, smiling in a rather bewildered manner as he unbuttoned his overcoat. "Welcome to the guerilla camp! And a dress suit! These walls haven't enclosed such a thing since you went away. This is indeed an occasion!"

Lightmark passed from group to group, deftly parrying, and returning the chorus of friendly thrusts, and shaking hands with the affability which was so characteristic a feature of his attitude toward them. The man he looked for, the friend whom he intended to honour with a somewhat tardy confidence of his happiness, was not there. When he asked for Rainham, he was told that "the dry-docker," as these flippant youngsters familiarly designated the silent man, whom they secretly revered, had gone for an after-dinner stroll, or perchance to the theatre, with Oswyn.

"With Oswyn?" queried Lightmark, with the shadow of a frown.

"Oh, Oswyn and he are getting very thick!" said Copal. "They are almost as inseparable as you two used to be. I'm afraid you will find yourself cut out. Three is an awkward number, you know. But when did you come back? When are you going to show us your sketches? And how long did you stay in Paris?... You didn't stop in Paris? This won't do, you know. I say, Dupuis, here's a man who didn't stop in Paris! Ask him if he wants to insult you."

"Ah, mon cher!" expostulated the Frenchman, looking up from his game of dominoes, "I would not stop in London if I could help it."

"Oh, shut up, Copal!" said Lightmark good-humouredly. "I was with ladies—Dupuis will sympathize with me there, eh, mon vieux?—and they wanted to stay at Lucerne until the last minute. So we came straight through."

"Then you haven't seen Sarah in 'Cleopatra,' and we were relying on you for an unvarnished account. Ladies, too! See here, my boy, you won't get any good out of touring about the Continent with ladies. Hang it all! I believe it'll come true, after all?"

"Very likely—what?"

"Oh, well, they said—I didn't believe it, but they said that you were going to desert the camp, and prance about with corpulent R.A.'s in Hanover Square."

"And so would we all, if we got the chance," said McAllister cynically.

And after the general outcry which followed this suggestion, the conversation drifted back to the old discussion of the autumn shows, the pastels at the Grosvenor, and the most recent additions to the National Gallery.

When at last Rainham came into the room, following, with his habitual half-timid air, the shambling figure of the painter Oswyn, it struck Lightmark that he had grown older, and that he had, as it were, assimilated some of the intimate disreputability of the place: it would no longer have been possible to single him out as a foreign unit in the circle, or to detect in his mental attitude any of the curiosity of the casual seeker after new impressions, the Philistine in Bohemia. There was nothing but pleasure in the slight manifestation of surprise which preceded his frank greeting of Lightmark, a greeting thoroughly English in its matter-of-fact want of demonstrativeness, and the avoidance of anything likely to attract the attention of others.