closed.

"You recognised your domain?" he asked lightly, when the other had
responded in the affirmative--"in my picture, I mean?"

He spoke quickly, in his accustomed blithe habit; it might have been
merely a morbid fancy of Rainham's which traced a note of anxiety,
of concealed uneasiness, in his accent, that the bare question
scarcely justified.

Rainham paused a moment: it was not only a passing thought of
Oswyn's acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had
been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it
was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the
disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a
disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House,
and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied. Acquitting Dick of
any conscious plagiarism, of a breach of common honesty, he was
disagreeably filled with a sense of the work's immeasurable
inferiority to Oswyn's ruined masterpiece. It was clever, and
audacious, and striking; it had had the fortune to be splendidly
hung, and that was all, for all his goodwill, he could say. And
since, after all, that was so little, would strike his friend as but
a cold tribute after the panegyrics of the morning papers, he
preferred to say nothing, deftly dropping the subject, and
responding to the first half of his friend's question alone.

"My domain, Dick? Ah, I forgot; you can hardly have heard that it is
my domain no longer--or ceases to be very shortly. That has come to
an end; I have sold it."

Lightmark whistled softly.

"Well, you surprise me! Of course I am glad; we will be glad too. We
shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?"

"Abroad?" echoed Rainham absently. "Oh, yes, very probably. But tell
me, how is--Eve?"

"As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you
herself."

They descended, and Rainham waited silently while his friend
discharged the cabman, and let him in with his latch-key into the
bright, spacious hall. Then, after glancing into the empty
drawing-room, Lightmark preceded him up the thick carpeted stairs,
on which their footsteps scarcely sounded, and stopped at the door
of Eve's boudoir, through which a woman's voice, speaking rather
rapidly, and, as it struck him, in a key of agitation, fell upon
Rainham's ear with a certain familiarity, though he was sure it was
not Eve's, and could not remember when or where he might have heard
it. Af