wings were all put away,
all save that portrait, he gave an inquisitive glance round my library.
It was the same glance as Maschka had given when she had feared to
intrude on my time; but Schofield did these things with a much more heavy
hand. He departed, but not before telling me that even my mansion
contained such treasures as it had never held before.

That evening, after glancing at Schofield's "scenario," I carefully
folded it up again for return to him, lest when the book should appear
he should miss the pleasure of saying that I had had his guidance but
had disregarded it; then I sat down at my writing-table and took out
the loose notes I had made. I made other jottings, each on a blank sheet
for subsequent amplification; and the sheets overspread the large
leather-topped table and thrust one another up the standard of the
incandescent with the pearly silk shade. The firelight shone low and
richly in the dusky spaces of the large apartment; and the thick carpet
and the double doors made the place so quiet that I could hear my watch
ticking in my pocket.

I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other
notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four
illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career,
Andriaovsky had put his name. I carried them to the table, and twinkled
as I opened the first of them. It was a book of poems, and in making the
designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly _not_ found for himself.
Almost any one of the "Art Shades," as he had called them, could have
done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again. I did not propose to
have much mercy on _that_. Already Schofield's words had given birth to a
suspicion in my mind--that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows,
Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he "thought highly" of
them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of
his; and they naturally did not see the joke. That joke, too, was between
himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his "Life." As if he had been
there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice.

"You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know. A little rough on them
you were. But there's a book here of yours that I'm going to tell the
truth about. You and I won't pretend to one another. It's a rotten book,
and both you and I know it...."

I don't know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then
something that I had been l