composition
crowded with life-size figures on which Watson was engaged. It was an
illustration of some Chaucerian lines, describing the face of a man on
his way to execution, seen among a crowd:

'a pale face
Among a press ...'

so stricken that, amid all the thronging multitude, 'men might know
his face that was bestead' from all the rest.

The idea--of helpless pain, in the grip of cruel and triumphant
force--had been realised with a passionate wealth of detail,
comparable to some of the early work of Holman Hunt. The head of the
victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her
eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by
this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe--and in the distance
a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister--each figure and group,
rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it
something harshly, intolerably true. The picture was too painful to be
borne; but it was neither common nor mean.

Cuningham turned away from it with a shudder.

'Some of it's magnificent, Dick--but I couldn't live with it if you
paid me!'

'Because you look at it wrongly,' said Watson, gruffly. 'You take it
as an anecdote. It isn't an anecdote--it's a symbol.'

'What?--The World?--and The Victim?--from all time?--and to all time?
Well, that makes it more gruesome than ever. Hullo, who's that? Come
in!'

The door opened. A young man, in some embarrassment, appeared on the
threshold.

'I believe these letters are yours,' he said, offering a couple to
Cuningham. 'They brought them up to me by mistake.'

Philip Cuningham took them with thanks, then scanned the newcomer as
he was turning to depart.

'I think I saw you at Berners Street the other night?'

John Fenwick paused.

'Yes--' he said, awkwardly.

'Have you been attending all the summer?'

'Pretty well. There were about half a dozen fellows left in August. We
clubbed together to keep the model going.'

'I don't remember you in the Academy.'

'No. I come from the North. I've painted a lot already--I couldn't be
bothered with the Academy!'

Watson turned and looked at the figure in the doorway.

'Won't you come in and sit down?'

The young man hesitated. Then something in his look kindled as it fell
on Watson's superb head, with its strong, tossed locks of ebon-black
hair touched with grey, the penthouse brows, and the blue eyes beneath
with their tragic force of expressio