and
in the eyes of the more enthusiastic tears of delight were seen to
glisten. Tchartkoff himself stood open-mouthed and motionless before the
wonderful painting, whose merits and beauties the spectators at last
began to discuss. He was roused from abstraction by being appealed to
for his opinion. In vain did he strive to resume his dignified air, and
to give utterance to the musty commonplace of criticism. The
contemptuous smile was chased from his features by the workings of
emotion; his breast heaved with a convulsive sob, and after a moment's
violent but ineffectual struggle, he burst into tears and rushed wildly
from the hall.

A few minutes later he stood motionless, almost paralysed, in his own
magnificent studio. The bandage had fallen from his eyes. He saw how he
had squandered the best years of his youth; how he had trampled and
stifled the spark of that fire once burning within him, which might have
been fanned till it blazed up into grandeur and glory, and extorted
tears of gratitude and admiration from a wondering world. All this he
had sacrificed and thrown away, heedlessly, madly, brutally. There
suddenly revived in his soul those enthusiastic aspirations he once had
known. He caught up a pencil and approached a canvass. The sweat of
eagerness stood upon his brow; his soul was filled with one passionate
desire--one solitary thought burned in his brain. The zeal for art, the
thirst for fame he once so strongly felt, had suddenly returned, evoked
from their lurking-place by the mute voice of another's genius. And why,
Tchartkoff thought, should not he also excel? His hand trembled with
feverish impatience till he could scarcely hold the pencil. He took for
his subject a fallen angel. The idea was in accordance with his frame of
mind. But, alas! how soon he was convinced of the vanity of his efforts!
His hand and imagination had been too long confined to one line and
limit, and his fierce but impotent endeavour to overleap the barrier, to
break his self-imposed fetters, had no result. He had despised and
neglected the fundamental condition of future greatness--the long and
fatiguing ladder of study and reflection. Maddened by disappointment,
furious at the conviction of impotency, he ignominiously dismissed from
his studio all his later and most esteemed productions, to which places
of honour had been accorded--all his lifeless, senseless, fashionable
portraits of hussars, ladies of fashion, and privy counc