ve been doing, and especially all about your Academy picture;
I haven't seen even a critique of it. Of course it's a success? Have
you sold it?"

"Oh, spare my modesty!" protested Lightmark somewhat clumsily, with
a quick glance at Oswyn. "It's all right, but we mustn't talk shop."

"Yes, for God's sake spare his modesty!" supplemented the other
painter almost brutally. "Look at his blushes. It isn't so bad as
all that, Lightmark."

"I don't even know the subject," pursued Rainham. "You might at
least tell me what it was. Was it the canvas which you wouldn't show
me, just before I went away--at the studio? The one about which you
made such a mystery----?"

"Oh bosh, old man!" interrupted Dick hurriedly, "I never made any
mystery. It--it wasn't that. It's quite an ordinary subject, one of
the river scenes which I sketched here. You had better go and see
it. And come and see us. You know the address. I must be off!"

"Wait a minute," interposed Oswyn, with a cadence in his voice which
struck Rainham as the signal of something surpassing his wonted
eccentricity. "Don't go yet. I said just now, Rainham, that I
wouldn't tell you why I had painted out that picture, the picture
which I had been fool enough to talk about so much, which I had
intended to make a masterpiece. Well, I have changed my mind. I
think you ought to know. Perhaps you would prefer to tell him?" he
added, turning savagely to Lightmark, and speaking fast and loud
with the curious muscular tremor which betokens difficult restraint.
"No? Of course you will have the impudence to pretend that the
conception was yours. Yes, curse you! you are quite capable of
swearing that it was all yours--subject and treatment too.... But
you can't deny that you heard me talking of the thing night after
night at the club, when I have no doubt you hadn't even begun on
your bastard imitation. One of the pictures of the year as they call
it, as you and your damned crew of flatterers and critics call it...."

He stopped for breath, clutching at the table with one hand and
letting the other, which had been upraised in denunciation, fall at
his side. He had meant to be calm, to limit himself strictly to an
explanation; but in the face of his wrong and the wrong-doer the
man's passionate nature had broken loose. Now, when he already half
repented of the violence with which he had profaned the house of his
friend, his eyes fell upon Rainham, and he felt abashed before the
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