en abroad? No. Strange! The artists nowadays neglected
travel. 'But you go! Beg your way, paint your way--but go! Go before
the wife and the babies come! Matrimony is the deuce. Don't you agree
with me, Philip?' He laid a familiar hand on the artist's arm.

'Take care!' said Cuningham, laughing. 'You don't know what I may have
been up to this summer.'

Findon shrugged his shoulders. 'I know a wise man when I see him. But
the fools there are about! Well, I take a strong line'--he waved his
hand, with a kind of laughing pomposity, rolling his words--'whenever
I see a young fellow marrying before he has got his training--before
he has seen a foreign gallery--before he can be sure of a year's
income ahead--above all, before he knows anything at all about
_women_, and the different ways in which they can play the devil with
you!--well, I give him up--I don't go to see his pictures--I don't
bother about him any more. The man's an ass--must be an ass!--let him
bray his bray! Why, you remember Perry?--Marindin?'

On which there followed a rattling catalogue of matrimonial failures
in the artist world, amusing enough--perhaps a little cruel. Cuningham
laughed. Watson, on whom Lord Findon's whole personality seemed to
have an effect more irritating than agreeable, fidgeted with his
brushes. He struck in presently with the dry remark that artists were
not the only persons who made imprudent marriages.

Lord Findon sprang up at once, and changed the subject. His youngest
son, the year before, had married the nurse who had pulled him through
typhoid--and was still in exile, and unforgiven.

Meanwhile no one had noticed John Fenwick. He stood behind the other
two while Lord Findon was talking--frowning sometimes and restless--a
movement now and then in lips and body, as though he were about to
speak--yet not speaking. It was one of those moments when a man feels
a band about his tongue, woven by shyness or false shame, or social
timidity. He knows that he ought to speak; but the moment passes and
he has not spoken. And between him and the word unsaid there rises on
the instant a tiny streamlet of division, which is to grow and broaden
with the nights and days, till it flows, a stream of fate, not to be
turned back or crossed; and all the familiar fields of life are ruined
and blotted out.

Finally, as the great patron was going, Cuningham whispered a word in
his ear. Lord Findon turned to Fenwick.

'You're in this house, too?