beauty seems to include all spiritual things. It cast a spell over him of a long mental silence, as one might say, in which all definite thought expired, from which he aroused himself at last with a shrug of self-contempt, to find inexplicable tears in his eyes. And just then an interruption came, not altogether unwelcome, in the greeting of a familiar voice. It was Lightmark, who had discovered him in the course of a rapid walk down the Row, and had crossed over the small patch of intervening grass to make his salutations. "I knew you by your back," he remarked, after they had shaken hands--"the ineffable languor of it; and, besides, who else but you would sit for choice on an October evening in such a wretched place?" He looked down ruefully at his patent leather shoes, which the damp grass had dulled. Rainham smiled vaguely; he needed an effort to pull himself together, to collect his energies sufficiently to meet the commonplace of conversation, after the curious detachment into which he had fallen; and he wondered aimlessly how long he had been there. "I suppose, like everyone else, Dick," he remarked after a while, "it is the weather which has brought you home at such an unfashionable date." "Yes," answered Lightmark; "it was very poor fun yachting. I shall stay in town altogether next year, I think. And you--you are not looking particularly fit; what have you done with yourself?" "Oh, I am fit enough," said Rainham lightly; "I have been in London, you see." "Well, I can't let you go now you are here. Won't you dine with us? Or rather--no, I believe we dine out. Come back and have some tea; Eve will be enchanted. I really decline to sit in that puddle." Rainham rose slowly. "Perhaps I will," he said. "I would have called before, if I had thought there was the least chance of finding you. And how do things go?" As they strolled along through the deserted Park, and Lightmark entertained his friend with an extravagant narration of their miseries on the _Lucifer_, the chronic sea-sickness of the ladies, the incapacity and intoxication of the steward, and the discontent of everybody on board--he spoke as if they had entertained a considerable party--Rainham's interested eyes had leisure to note a change in him, not altogether unexpected. He presented the same handsome, well-dressed, prosperous figure; and yet prosperity had in some degree coarsened him. The old charm of his boyish carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard assurance, an air of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less the note of an artist than of a successful man of business. And where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Cafe Grecco days, broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his expenditure.