Fenwick had never spent a more arduous hour than that which he devoted
to the business of dressing for Lord Findon's dinner-party. It was his
first acquaintance with dress-clothes. He had, indeed, dined once or
twice at the tables of the Westmoreland gentry in the course of his
portrait-painting experiences. But there had been no 'party,' and it
had been perfectly understood that for the Kendal bookseller's son
a black Sunday coat was sufficient. Now, however, he was to meet the
great world on its own terms; and though he tried hard to disguise his
nervousness from his sponsor, Philip Cuningham, he did not succeed.
Cuningham instructed him where to buy a second-hand dress-suit that
very nearly fitted him, and he had duly provided himself with gloves
and tie. When all was done he put his infinitesimal looking-glass on
the floor of his attic, flanked it with two guttering candles, and
walked up and down before it in a torment, observing his own demeanour
and his coat's, saying 'How d'ye do?' and 'Good-bye' to an imaginary
host, or bending affably to address some phantom lady across the
table.
When at last he descended the stairs, he felt as though he were just
escaped from a wrestling-match. He followed Cuningham into the omnibus
with nerves all on edge. He hated the notion, too, of taking an
omnibus to go and dine in St. James's Square. But Cuningham's Scotch
thriftiness scouted the proposal of a hansom.
On the way Fenwick suddenly asked his companion whether there was a
Lady Findon. Cuningham, startled by the ignorance of his _protégé_,
drew out as quickly as he could _la carte du pays_.
Lady Findon, the second wife, fat, despotic, and rich, rather noisy,
and something of a character, a political hostess, a good friend, and
a still better hater; two sons, silent, good-looking and clever, one
in the brewery that provided his mother with her money, the other
in the Hussars; two daughters not long 'introduced'--one pretty--the
other bookish and rather plain; so ran the catalogue.
'I believe there is another daughter by the first
wife--married--something queer about the husband. But I've never seen
her. She doesn't often appear--Hullo--here we are.'
They alighted at the Haymarket, and as they walked down the street
Fenwick found himself in the midst of the evening whirl of the West
End. The clubs were at their busiest; men passed them in dress-suits
and overcoats like themselves, and the street was full of hansoms,
whence the faces of well-dressed women, enveloped in soft silks and
furs, looked out.
Fenwick felt himself treading a new earth. At such an hour he was
generally wending his way to a Bloomsbury eating-house, where he
dined for eighteenpence; he was a part of the striving, moneyless
student-world.
But here, from this bustling Haymarket with its gay, hurrying figures,
there breathed new forces, new passions which bewildered him. As he
was looking at the faces in the carriages, the jewels and feathers
and shining stuffs, he thought suddenly and sharply of Phoebe sitting
alone at her supper in the tiny cottage room. His heart smote him a
little. But, after all, was he not on her business as well as his own?
The door of Lord Findon's house opened before them. At sight of the
liveried servants within, Fenwick's pride asserted itself. He walked
in, head erect, as though the place belonged to him.
Lord Findon came pleasantly to greet them as they entered the
drawing-room, and took them up to Lady Findon. Cuningham she already
knew, and she gave a careless glance and a touch of the hand to his
companion. It was her husband's will to ask these raw, artistic youths
to dinner, and she had to put up with it; but really the difficulty of
knowing whom to send them in with was enormous.
'I am glad to make your acquaintance,' she said, mechanically, to
Fenwick, as he stood awkwardly beside her, while her eyes searched the
door for a Cabinet Minister and his wife who were the latest guests.
'Thank you; I too am pleased to make yours,' said Fenwick, nervously
pulling at his gloves, and furious with his own _malaise_.
Lady Findon's eyebrows lifted in amusement. She threw him another
glance.
Good-looking!--but really Findon should wait till they were a little
_décrotté_.
'I hear your picture is charming,' she said, distractedly; and then,
suddenly perceiving the expected figures, she swept forward to receive
them.
'Very sorry, my dear fellow, we have no lady for you; but you will
be next my daughter, Madame de Pastourelles,' said Lord Findon, a few
minutes later, in his ear, passing him with a nod and a smile. His
gay, half-fatherly ways with these rising talents were well known.
They made part of his fame with his contemporaries; a picturesque
element in his dinner-parties which the world appreciated.
Fenwick found his way rather sulkily to the dining-room. It annoyed
him that Cuningham had a lady and he had none. His companion on the
road downstairs was the private secretary, who tried good-naturedly
to point out the family portraits on the staircase wall. But Fenwick
scarcely replied. He stalked on, his great black eyes glancing
restlessly from side to side; and the private secretary thought him a
boor.
As he was standing bewildered inside the dining-room a servant caught
hold of him and piloted him to his seat. A lady in white, who was
already seated in the next chair, looked up and smiled.
'My father told me we were to be neighbours. I must introduce myself.'
She held out a small hand, which, in his sudden pleasure, Fenwick
grasped more cordially than was necessary. She withdrew it smiling,
and he sat down, feeling himself an impulsive ass, intimidated by the
lights, the flowers, the multitude of his knives and forks, and most
of all, perhaps, by this striking and brilliant creature beside him.
Madame de Pastourelles was of middle height, slenderly built, with
pale-brown hair, and a delicately white face, of a very perfect oval.
She had large, quiet eyes, darker than her hair; features small, yet
of a noble outline--strength in refinement. The proud cutting of the
nose and mouth gave delight; it was a pride so unconscious, so masked
in sweetness, that it challenged without wounding. The short upper lip
was sensitive and gay; the eyes ranged in a smiling freedom; the
neck and arms were beautiful. Her dress, according to the Whistlerian
phrase just coming into vogue, might have been called an 'arrangement
in white.' The basis of it seemed to be white velvet; and breast and
hair were powdered with diamonds delicately set in old flower-like
shapes.
'You are in the same house with Mr. Cuningham?' she asked, when a
dean had said grace and the soup was served. Her voice was soft and
courteous; the irritation in Fenwick felt the soothing of it.
'I am on the floor above.'
'He paints charming things.'
Fenwick hesitated.
'You think so?' he said, bluntly, turning to look at her.
She coloured slightly and laughed.
'Do you mean to put me in the Palace of Truth?'
'Of course I would if I could,' said Fenwick, also laughing. 'But I
suppose ladies never say quite what they mean.'
'Oh yes, they do. Well, then, I am not much enamoured of Mr.
Cuningham's pictures. I like _him_, and my father likes his painting.'
'Lord Findon admires that kind of thing?'
'Besides a good many other kinds. Oh! my father has a dreadfully
catholic taste. He tells me you haven't been abroad yet?'
Fenwick acknowledged it.
'Ah, well; of course you'll go. All artists do--except'--she dropped
her voice--'the gentleman opposite.'
Fenwick looked, and beheld a personage scarcely, indeed, to be seen
at all for his very bushy hair, whiskers, and moustache, from
which emerged merely the tip of a nose and a pair of round eyes in
spectacles. As, however, the hair was of an orange colour and the eyes
of a piercing and pinlike sharpness, the eclipse of feature was not
a loss of effect. And as the flamboyant head was a tolerably familiar
object in the shop-windows of the photographers and in the illustrated
papers, Fenwick recognised almost immediately one of the most popular
artists of the day--Mr. Herbert Sherratt.
Fenwick flushed hotly.
'Lord Findon doesn't admire _his_ work?' he said, almost with
fierceness, turning to his companion.
'He hates his pictures and collects his drawings.'
'Drawings!' Fenwick shrugged his shoulders. 'Anybody can make a clever
drawing. It's putting on the paint that counts. Why doesn't he go
abroad?'
'Oh, well, he does go to Holland. But he thinks Italian painting all
stuff, and that so many Madonnas and saints encourage superstition.
But what's the use of talking? They have to station a policeman beside
his picture in the Academy to keep off the crowd. Hush-sh! He is
looking this way.'
She turned her head, and Fenwick feared she was lost to him. He
managed to get in another question. 'Are there any other painters
here?'
She pointed out the president of the Academy, a sculptor, and an
art-critic, at whose name Fenwick curled his lip, full of the natural
animosity of the painter to the writer.
'And, of course, you know my neighbour?'
Fenwick looked hastily, and saw a very handsome youth bending forward
to answer a question which Lord Findon had addressed to him from
across the table; a face in the 'grand style'--almost the face of
a Greek--pure in outline, bronzed by foreign suns, and lit by
eyes expressing so strong a force of personality that, but for the
sweetness with which it was tempered, the spectator might have been
rather repelled than won. When the young man answered Lord Findon, the
voice was, like the face, charged--perhaps over-charged--with meaning
and sensibility.
'I took Madame de Pastourelles to see it to-day,' the youth was
saying. 'She thought it as glorious as I did.'
'Oh! you are a pair of enthusiasts,' said Lord Findon. 'I keep my
head.'
The 'it' turned out to be a Titian portrait from the collection of
an old Roman family, lately brought to London and under offer to the
National Gallery, of which Lord Findon was a trustee.
Madame de Pastourelles looked towards her father, confirming what
the unknown youth had said. Her eyes had kindled. She began to talk
rapidly in defence of her opinion. Between her, Lord Findon, and her
neighbour there arose a conversation which made Fenwick's ears tingle.
How many things and persons and places it touched upon that were
wholly unknown to him! Pictures in foreign museums--Vienna, Berlin,
St. Petersburg--the names of French or German experts--quotations from
Italian books or newspapers--the three dealt lightly and familiarly
with a world in which Fenwick had scarcely a single landmark. How
clever she was! how charming! What knowledge without a touch of
pedantry! And how the handsome youth kept up with her--nay, rather,
led her, with a mastery, a resource, to which she always yielded in
case of any serious difference of opinion! It seemed that they
had been abroad together--had seen many sights in each other's
company--had many common friends.
Fenwick felt himself strangely sore and jealous as he listened. Who
was this man? Some young aristocrat, no doubt, born silver spoon in
mouth--one of your idle, insolent rich, with nothing to do but make a
hobby of art, and patronise artists. He loathed the breed.
Her voice startled him back from these unspoken tirades, and once more
he found her eyes fixed upon him. It provoked him to feel that their
scrutiny made him self-conscious--anxious to please. They were so
gentle, so gay!--and yet behind the first expression there sat what
seemed to him the real personality, shrewd, critical, and remote.
'You must see this picture,' she said, kindly. 'It's glorious!'
'Where is it?'
'In a house near here. But father could get you in.'
He hesitated, then laughed, ungraciously.
'I don't seem to have finished yet with the National Gallery.
Who--please--is the gentleman on your right?'
She smiled.
'Oh! don't you know him? You must let me introduce him. It is Mr.
Arthur Welby. Doesn't he talk well?'
She introduced them. Welby received the introduction with a
readiness--a touch of eagerness indeed--which seemed to show a mind
favourably prepared for it.
'Lord Findon tells me you're sending in a most awfully jolly thing
to the Academy!' he said, bending across Madame de Pastourelles, his
musical voice full of cordiality. Fenwick made a muttered reply. It
might have been thought he disliked being talked to about his own
work. Welby accordingly changed the subject at once; he returned to
the picture he had been pressing on Lord Findon.
'Haven't you seen it? You really should.' But this elicited even less
response. Fenwick glared at him--apparently tongue-tied. Then Madame
de Pastourelles and her neighbour talked to each other, endeavouring
to draw in the stranger. In vain. They fell back, naturally, into
the talk of intimates, implying a thousand common memories and
experiences; and Fenwick found himself left alone.
His mind burned with annoyance and self-disgust. Why did he let these
people intimidate him? Why was he so ridiculously self-conscious?--so
incapable of holding his own? He knew all about Arthur Welby; his name
and fame were in all the studios. The author of the picture of the
year--in the opinion, at least, of the cultivated minority for whom
rails and policemen were not the final arbiters of merit; glorified in
the speeches at the Academy banquet; and already overwhelmed with more
commissions than he could take--Welby should have been one of the
best hated of men. On the contrary, his mere temperament had drawn
the teeth of that wild beast, Success. Well-born, rich, a social
favourite, trained in Paris and Italy, an archaeologist and student as
well as a painter, he commanded the world as he pleased. Society asked
him to dinners, and he gave himself no professional airs and went
when he could. But among his fellows he lived a happy comrade's life,
spending his gifts and his knowledge without reserve, always ready to
help a man in a tight place, to praise a friend's picture, to take up
a friend's quarrel. He took his talent and his good-fortune so simply
that the world must needs insist upon them, instead of contesting
them.
As for his pictures, they were based on the Italian tradition--rich,
accurate, learned, full of literary allusion and reminiscence. In
Fenwick's eyes, young as was their author, they were of the past
rather than of the future. He contemptuously thought of them as
belonging to a dead _genre_. But the man who painted them could
_draw_.
Meanwhile he seemed to have lost Madame de Pastourelles, and must
needs fall back on the private secretary beside him. This gentleman,
who had already entered him on the tablets of the mind as a mannerless
outsider, was not particularly communicative. But at least Fenwick
learned the names of the other guests. The well-known Ambassador
beside Lady Findon, with a shrewd, thin, sulky face, and very black
eyes under whitish hair--eyes turned much more frequently on the
pretty actress to his right than upon his hostess; a financier
opposite, much concerned with great colonial projects; the Cabinet
Minister--of no account, it seemed, either in the House or the
Cabinet--and his wife, abnormally thin, and far too discreet for the
importance of her husband's position; a little farther, the wife of
the red-haired Academician, a pale, frightened creature who looked
like her husband's apology, and was in truth his slave;--all these he
learned gradually to discriminate.
So this was the great world. He was stormily pleased to be in it,
and at the same time scornful of it. It seemed to contain not a few
ancient shams and hollow pretenders--
Ah! once more the soft, ingratiating voice beside him. Madame de
Pastourelles was expressing a flattering wish to see his picture, of
which her father had talked so much.
'And he says you have found such a beautiful model--or, rather, better
than beautiful--characteristic.'
Fenwick stared at her. It was on the tip of his tongue to say 'She
is my wife.' But he did not say it. He imagined her look of
surprise--'Ah, my father had no idea!'--imagined it with a morbid
intensity, and saw no way of confronting or getting round it; not
at the dinner-table, anyway--with all these eyes and ears about
him--above all, with Lord Findon opposite. Why, they might think he
had been ashamed of Phoebe!--that there was some reason for hiding her
away. It was ridiculous--most annoying and absurd; but now that
the thing had happened, he must really choose his own moment for
unravelling the coil.
So he stammered something unintelligible about a 'Westmoreland type,'
and then hastily led the talk to some other schemes he had in mind.
With the sense of having escaped a danger he found his tongue for the
first time, and the power of expressing himself.
Madame de Pastourelles listened attentively--drew him out,
indeed--made him show himself to the best advantage. And presently, at
a moment of pause, she said, with a smile and a shrug, 'How happy you
are to have an art! Now I--'
She let her hand fall with a little plaintive movement.
'I am sure you paint,' said Fenwick, eagerly.
'No.'
'Then you are musical?'
'Not at all. I embroider--'
'All women should,' said Fenwick, trying for a free and careless air.
'I read--'
'You do not need to say it.'
She opened her eyes at this readiness of reply; but still pursued:
'And I have a Chinese pug.'
'And no children?' The words rose to Fenwick's lips, but remained
unspoken. Perhaps she divined them, for she began hastily to describe
her dog--its tricks and fidelities. Fenwick could meet her here; for
a mongrel fox-terrier--taken, a starving waif, out of the streets--had
been his companion since almost the first month of his solitude. Each
stimulated the other, and they fell into those legends of dog-life in
which every dog-lover believes, however sceptical he may be in other
directions. Till presently she said, with a sigh and a stiffening of
her delicate features:
'But mine shows some symptoms of paralysis. He was run over last
summer. I'm afraid it will be long and painful.'
Fenwick replied that she should send for the vet. and have the dog
painlessly killed.
'No. I shall nurse him.'
'Why should you look on at suffering?'
'Why not--if sometimes he enjoys life?'
'I am thinking of the mistress.'
'Oh, for us,' she said, quickly, 'for me--it is good to be with
suffering.'
As she spoke, she drew herself slightly more erect. Neither tone nor
manner showed softness, made any appeal. The words seemed to have
dropped from her, and the strange pride and dignity she at once threw
around them made a veiling cloud through which only a man entirely
without the finer perceptions would have tried to penetrate. Fenwick,
for all his surface _gaucherie_, did not attempt it. But he attacked
her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it
a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy--love of the earth and its natural
pleasures--courage to take and dare--avoidance of suffering--and war
on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which
showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality,
whatever value they might have as a philosophy.
She listened with a charming kindness, laughing now and then, putting
in a humorous comment or two, and never by another word betraying her
own position. But he was more and more conscious of the double self in
her--of the cultivated, social self she was bringing into play for his
benefit, and of something behind--a spirit watchful and still--wrapt
in a great melancholy--or perhaps a great rebellion? And by this sense
of something concealed or strongly restrained, she began to affect
his imagination, and so, presently, to absorb his attention. Something
exquisite in her movements and looks, also in the quality of her voice
and the turn of her phrases, drew from his own crude yet sensitive
nature an excited response. He began to envisage what these highly
trained women of the upper class, these _raffinées_ of the world, may
be for those who understand them--a stimulus, an enigma, an education.
It flashed on him that women of this type could teach him much that he
wanted to know; and his ambition seized on the idea. But what chance
that she would ever give another thought to the raw artist to whom her
father had flung a passing invitation?
He made haste, indeed, to prove his need of her or some other Egeria;
for she was no sooner departed with the other ladies than he came
to mischief. Left alone with the gentlemen, his temperament asserted
itself. He had no mind in any company to be merely a listener.
Moreover, that slight, as he regarded it, of sending him down without
a lady, still rankled; and last, but not least, he had drunk a good
deal of champagne, to which he was quite unaccustomed. So that when
Lord Findon fell into a discussion with the Ambassador of Irving's
_Hamlet_ and _Othello_, then among the leading topics of London--when
the foreigner politely but emphatically disparaged the English actor
and Lord Findon with zeal defended him--who should break into the
august debate but this strong-browed, black-eyed fellow, from no one
knew where, whose lack of some of the smaller conventions had already
been noticed by a few of the company.
At first all looked well. A London dinner-party loves novelty, and is
always ready to test the stranger within its gates. Fenwick slipped
into the battle as a supporter of Lord Findon's argument, and his host
with smiling urbanity welcomed him to the field. But in a few minutes
the newcomer had ravaged the whole of it. The older men were silenced,
and Fenwick was leaning across the table, gesticulating with one hand,
and lifting his port-wine with the other, addressing now Lord Findon
and now the Ambassador--who stared at him in amazement--with an
assurance that the world only allows to its oldest favourites. Lord
Findon in vain tried to stop him.
'Didn't know this was to be a dinner with speeches,' murmured the
financier, after a few minutes, in his neighbour's ear. 'Think I'll
get up and propose a vote of thanks to the chairman.'
'There ought, at least, to be a time-limit,' said the neighbour, with
a shrug. 'Where on earth did Findon pick him up?'
'I say, what an awfully rum chap!' said the young son of the
house--wondering--to Arthur Welby. 'What does he talk like that for?'
'He doesn't talk badly,' said Welby, whose mouth showed the laughter
within.
Meanwhile Fenwick--loud-voiced, excited--had brought his raid to a
climax by an actual attack upon the stately Frenchman opposite, whose
slight sarcastic look pricked him intolerably. All other conversation
at the table fell dumb.
Lord Findon coloured, and rose.
'You are a great deal more sure of my own opinion than I am myself,'
he said, coldly. 'I am much obliged to you, but--shall we adjourn this
conversation?'
As the men walked upstairs, Fenwick realised that he had blundered;
he felt himself isolated and in disfavour. Arthur Welby had approached
him, but Lord Findon had rather pointedly drawn an arm through Welby's
and swept him away. No one else spoke to him, and even the private
secretary, who had before befriended him, left him severely alone.
None of the ladies in the drawing-room upstairs showed, as it seemed
to him, any desire for his company, and he was reduced to looking at
a stand of miniatures near the door, while his heart swelled fiercely.
So this was what society meant?--a wretched pleasure purchased on
degrading terms! A poor dependant like himself, he supposed, was to be
seen and not heard--must speak when he was spoken to, play chorus, and
whisper humbleness. As to meeting these big-wigs on equal terms, that
clearly was not expected. An artist may be allowed to know something
about art; on any other subject let him listen to his betters.
He said to himself that he was sick of the whole business; and he
would gladly have slipt through the open door down the stairs, and
out of the house. He was restrained, however, by the protest of a
sore ambition which would not yet admit defeat. Had he set Lord Findon
against him?--ruined the chance of a purchaser for his picture and
of a patron for the future? Out of the corner of his eye he saw
Cuningham, neat, amiable, and self-possessed, sitting in a corner by
Lady Findon, who smiled and chatted incessantly. And it was clear to
him that Welby was the spoilt child of the room. Wherever he went men
and women grouped themselves about him; there was a constant eagerness
to capture him, an equal reluctance to let him go.
'Well, I'm as good as he--as either of them,' thought Fenwick
fiercely, as he handled a Cosway. 'Only they can talk these people's
lingo, and I can't. I can paint as well as they any day--and I'll be
bound, if they let me alone, I could talk as well. Why do people ask
you to their houses and then ill-treat you? Damn them!'
Meanwhile, Lord Findon had had a few whispered words with his daughter
in an inner room.
'My dear!'--throwing up his hands--'a _barbarian_! Can't have him here
again.'
'Mr. Fenwick, papa?'
'Of course. Cuningham ought to have warned me. However, I suppose I
brought it on myself. I do these rash things, and must pay for them.
He was so rude to De Chailles that I have had to apologise.'
'Poor papa! Where is he?'
'In the other room--looking at things. Better leave him alone.'
'Oh no; he'll feel himself neglected.'
'Well, let him. A man ought to be made to understand that he can't
behave like that.'
'What did he do?'
'My dear, he spoiled the whole business after dinner--harangued the
table!--as good as told De Chailles he had no right to talk about
Irving or Shakespeare, being a foreigner. You never saw such an
exhibition!'
'Poor Mr. Fenwick. I must go and talk to him.'
'Eugénie, don't be a goose. Why should you take any trouble about
him?'
'He's wonderfully clever, papa. And clever people are always getting
into scrapes. Somebody must take him in hand.'
And, rising, she threw her father a whimsical backward look as she
departed. Lord Findon watched her with mingled smiles and chagrin.
How charmingly she was dressed to-night--his poor Eugénie! And how
beautifully she moved!--with what grace and sweetness! As he turned to
do his duty by an elderly countess near him, he stifled a sigh--that
was also an imprecation.
It had often been said of Eugénie de Pastourelles that she possessed
a social magic. She certainly displayed it on this occasion. Half an
hour later Lord Findon, who was traversing the drawing-rooms after
having taken the Ambassadress to her carriage, found a regenerate and
humanised Fenwick sitting beside his daughter; the centre, indeed, of
a circle no less friendly to untutored talent than the circle of the
dinner-table had been hostile. Lord Findon stopped to listen. Really
the young man was now talking decently!--about matters he understood;
Burne-Jones, Rossetti--some French pictures in Bond Street--and so
forth. The ruffled host was half appeased, half wroth. For if he
_could_ make this agreeable impression, why such a superfluity
of naughtiness downstairs? And the fellow had really some general
cultivation; nothing like Welby, of course--where would you find
another Arthur Welby?--but enough to lift him above the mere
journeyman. After all, one must be indulgent to these novices--with
no traditions behind them--and no--well, to put it plainly--no
grandfathers! And so, with reflexions of this kind, the annoyance of a
good-natured man subsided.
It was all Eugénie's doing, of course. She and Welby between them
had caught the bear, tamed him, and set him to show whatever parlour
tricks he possessed. Just like her! He hoped the young man understood
her condescension--and that to see her and talk with her was a
privilege. Involuntarily Lord Findon glanced across the room, at the
_décolleté_ shoulders and buxom good looks of his wife. When Eugénie
was in the house the second Lady Findon never seemed to him well
dressed.
When Fenwick and Cuningham had departed--Fenwick in a glow of grateful
good-humour, expressing himself effusively to his host--Madame de
Pastourelles approached her father, smiling.
'That youth has asked me to sit to him.'
'The audacious rascal!' cried Lord Findon, fuming. 'He has never seen
you before--and, besides, how does any one know what he can do?'
'Why, you said yourself his picture was remarkable.'
'So it is. But what's one picture? What do you think, Welby?' he
said, impulsively addressing the man beside him. 'Wasn't it like his
impudence?'
Welby smiled.
'Like Eugénie's kindness! It was rather charming to see his look when
she said "Yes"!'
'You said "_Yes_"!' Lord Findon stared at her.
'Come with me and see what he can do in a morning.' She laid a
quieting hand on her father's arm. 'You know that always amuses you.
And I want to see his picture.'
'His picture is not bad,' said Lord Findon, with decision.
'I think you will have to buy it, papa.'
'There you go,' said Lord Findon--'letting me in!'
'Well, I'm off to bed.' Smiling, she gave her hand to each, knowing
that she had gained her point, or would gain it. Arthur Welby,
turning, watched her move away, say 'Good-night' to Lady Findon, and
disappear through a distant door. Then for him, though the room was
still full of people, it was vacant. He slipped away without any more
'Good-byes.'