got it. He found a frame, and wrote out a ticket, and asked after
you. No one could have been kinder. You must go and have a look at it. I
shouldn't be at all surprised if it gets sold like that."

Priam answered nothing for a moment. He could not.

"What did Aylmer say about it?" he asked.

"Oh!" said his wife quickly, "you can't expect Mr. Aylmer to understand
these things. It's not in his line. But he was glad to oblige us. I saw
he arranged it nicely."

"Well," said Priam discreetly, "that's all right. Suppose we have
lunch?"

Curious--her relations with Mr. Aylmer! It was she who had recommended
him to go to Mr. Aylmer's when, on the first morning of his residence in
Putney, he had demanded, "Any decent tobacconists in this happy region?"
He suspected that, had it not been for Aylmer's beridden and incurable
wife, Alice's name might have been Aylmer. He suspected Aylmer of a
hopeless passion for Alice. He was glad that Alice had not been thrown
away on Aylmer. He could not imagine himself now without Alice. In spite
of her ideas on the graphic arts, Alice was his air, his atmosphere, his
oxygen; and also his umbrella to shield him from the hail of untoward
circumstances. Curious--the process of love! It was the power of love
that had put that picture in the tobacconist's window.

Whatever power had put it there, no power seemed strong enough to get it
out again. It lay exposed in the window for weeks and never drew a
crowd, nor caused a sensation of any kind! Not a word in the newspapers!
London, the acknowledged art-centre of the world, calmly went its ways.
The sole immediate result was that Priam changed his tobacconist, and
the direction of his promenades.

At last another singular event happened.

Alice beamingly put five sovereigns into Priam's hand one evening.

"It's been sold for five guineas," she said, joyous. "Mr. Aylmer didn't
want to keep anything for himself, but I insisted on his having the odd
shillings. I think it's splendid, simply splendid! Of course I always
_did_ think it was a beautiful picture," she added.

The fact was that this astounding sale for so large a sum as five
pounds, of a picture done in the attic by her Henry, had enlarged her
ideas of Henry's skill. She could no longer regard his painting as the
caprice of a gentle lunatic. There was something _in_ it. And now she
wanted to persuade herself that she had known from the first there was
something in it.

The picture