gance, a boundless
confidence in himself, flamed through all his veins. Let him paint,
paint, _paint_--think of nothing, care for nothing but the maturing of
his gift!

How long he lost himself in this passion of egotism and defiance he
hardly knew. He was roused from it by the servant bringing a lamp; and
as she set it down, the light fell upon a memorandum scrawled on the
edge of a sketch which was lying on the table: 'Feb. 21--10 o'clock.'

His mood collapsed. He sat down by the dying fire, brooding and
miserable. How on earth was he going to get through the next few
weeks? Abominable!--thoughtlessly cruel!--that neither Lord Findon nor
Madame de Pastourelles should ever yet have spoken to him of money!
These months of work on the portrait--this constant assumption on the
part of the Findon circle that both the portrait and the 'Genius Loci'
were to become Findon possessions--and yet no sum named--no clear
agreement even--nothing, as it seemed to Fenwick's suspicious temper,
in either case, that really bound Lord Findon. 'Write to the old
boy'--so Cuningham had advised again and again--'get something
definite out of him.' But Fenwick had once or twice torn up a letter
of the kind in morbid pride and despair. Suppose he were rebuffed?
That would be an end of the Findon connexion, and he could not bring
himself to face it. He must keep his _entree_ to the house; above all,
he clung to the portrait and the sittings.

But the immediate outlook was pretty dark. He was beginning to be
pestered with debts and duns--the appointment on the morrow was with
an old frame-maker who had lent him twenty pounds before Christmas,
and was now begging piteously for his money. There was nothing to pay
him with--nothing to send Phoebe, in spite of a constant labour at
paying jobs in black-and-white that often kept him up till three or
four in the morning. He wondered whether Watson would help him with a
loan. According to Cuningham, the queer fellow had private means.

The fact was he was overstrained--he knew it. The year had been the
hardest of his life, and now that he was approaching the time of
crisis--the completion of his two pictures, the judgement of the
Academy and the public, his nerve seemed to be giving way. As he
thought of all that success or failure might mean, he plunged into
a melancholy no less extravagant than the passion of self-confidence
from which he had emerged. Suppose that he fell ill before the
pictures w