dies
who must go about without mothers, brothers, uncles, carriages, or
attendants of any sort, are not often eaten or even roared at. It
is the dainty darlings for whom the roarings have to be feared. Mrs.
Dosett, aware that daintiness was no longer within the reach of her
and hers, did assent to these walkings in Kensington Gardens. At some
hour in the afternoon Lucy would walk from the house by herself, and
within a quarter of an hour would find herself on the broad gravel
path which leads down to the Round Pond. From thence she would go by
the back of the Albert Memorial, and then across by the Serpentine
and return to the same gate, never leaving Kensington Gardens. Aunt
Dosett had expressed some old-fashioned idea that lions were more
likely to roar in Hyde Park than within the comparatively retired
purlieus of Kensington.

Now the reader must be taken back for a few moments to the bijou, as
the bijou was before either the artist or his wife had died. In those
days there had been a frequent concourse of people in the artist's
house. Society there had not consisted chiefly of eating and
drinking. Men and women would come in and out as though really for
a purpose of talking. There would be three or four constantly with
Dormer in his studio, helping him but little perhaps in the real
furtherance of his work, though discussing art subjects in a manner
calculated to keep alive art-feeling among them. A novelist or two of
a morning might perhaps aid me in my general pursuit, but would, I
think, interfere with the actual tally of pages. Egbert Dormer did
not turn out from his hand so much work as some men that I know, but
he was overflowing with art up to his ears;--and with tobacco, so
that, upon the whole, the bijou was a pleasant rendezvous.

There had come there of late, quite of late, a young sculptor, named
Isadore Hamel. Hamel was an Englishman, who, however, had been
carried very early to Rome and had been bred there. Of his mother
question never was made, but his father had been well known as an
English sculptor resident at Rome. The elder Hamel had been a man of
mark, who had a fine suite of rooms in the city and a villa on one
of the lakes, but who never came to England. English connections
were, he said, to him abominable, by which he perhaps meant that the
restrictions of decent life were not to his taste. But his busts
came, and his groups in marble, and now and again some great work for
some public deco