e there had the good sense to exhibit nothing
extraordinary in their demeanour towards him. Only they were a
little less wildly humorous than of old, and more forbearing in
their sallies; the conversation died out for an instant as he made
his way quickly, with the faintest sign of recognition, through
their midst--and that was all.

Rainham's death had affected some of them for a few days perhaps,
but it had not the shock of the unexpected; they chiefly wondered
that he had dragged his life through so cruel a winter. And his
close alliance with Oswyn had, as a natural consequence, debarred
him from a real intimacy with any of the other men, who, for the
most part younger, cultivated different friendships and different
pursuits.

They had missed Oswyn during his seclusion of the last few weeks; he
was so essentially the presiding, silent genius of the place--a man
to be pointed out to new-comers, half ironically, as the greatest,
most deeply injured, of them all; the possessor of a talent
unapproached and unappreciated. They felt that his presence lent a
distinction to the dingy resort which it otherwise frequently
lacked: and he had come to be so far regarded as a permanent
institution, of an almost official nature, that even on the coldest
nights his chair by the fireside had remained untenanted.

When the next morning came, Oswyn felt desperately inclined to break
the promise which Mosenthal had, with some difficulty, exacted from
him, and to keep far from Bond Street and the crowd who even then
were assembling to cast their careless glances and light words at
the work of his life; it was only the fear of the taint of
cowardice, and a certain perversity, which induced him eventually to
present himself within the gallery rather late in the afternoon.

As he entered the room, looking about him with a kind of challenge,
many eyes were turned upon him (for people go to private views not
to see pictures--that is generally impossible--but to see and be
seen of men), but few had any suspicion that this strange man, with
the shabby, old-fashioned apparel, and expression half nervous, half
defiant, was the painter whose pictures they were pretending to
criticise.

Very few of those present--hardly half a dozen perhaps--knew him
even by sight; and while his evident disregard for social convention
marked him, for the discerning observer, as a person of probably
artistic distinction, the general conjecture set him down, n