isburn--fond enough not to see her absurdity.
It was his own absurdity he seemed to be wincing under--his own
attitude as an object for garlands and incense.

"My dear, since I've chucked painting people don't say that stuff about
me--they say it about Victor Grindle," was his only protest, as he rose
from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word. Victor Grindle was, in
fact, becoming the man of the moment--as Jack himself, one might put
it, had been the man of the hour. The younger artist was said to have
formed himself at my friend's feet, and I wondered if a tinge of
jealousy underlay the latter's mysterious abdication. But no--for it
was not till after that event that the _rose Dubarry_ drawing-rooms had
begun to display their "Grindles."

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to
her spaniel in the dining-room.

"Why _has_ he chucked painting?" I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

"Oh, he doesn't _have_ to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy
himself," she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its
_famille-verte_ vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains,
and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

"Has he chucked his pictures too? I haven't seen a single one in the
house."

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn's open countenance.
"It's his ridiculous modesty, you know. He says they're not fit to have
about; he's sent them all away except one--my portrait--and that I have
to keep upstairs."

His ridiculous modesty--Jack's modesty about his pictures? My curiosity
was growing like the bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my hostess: "I
must really see your portrait, you know."

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound's head between his knees.

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that tried
to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble Emperors
of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs poised
among flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and
distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in the
inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up all
Gi