"You must find that sort of thing rather a tax?" he asked tentatively, after a description which struck him as unnecessarily exuberant of a hospitality in the summer. "Oh, it pays in the long run," remarked the other easily, "to keep open house and go everywhere. Thank Heaven, the uncle is liberal! I admit we have been going at rather a pace lately. But, then, I can knock off a couple of pictures as soon as I have a little time, which will raise the wind again. I know what the public wants, bless it!" Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily. "Poor public! If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than I believed." Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his long moustache. He was absorbed for some time--they had turned into the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again--in ineffectual pursuit of cabs. When at last he had caught a driver's eye, and they had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy before it closed. "You recognised your domain?" he asked lightly, when the other had responded in the affirmative--"in my picture, I mean?" He spoke quickly, in his accustomed blithe habit; it might have been merely a morbid fancy of Rainham's which traced a note of anxiety, of concealed uneasiness, in his accent, that the bare question scarcely justified. Rainham paused a moment: it was not only a passing thought of Oswyn's acrimony, and of the difficult minutes during which he had been thrown across Lightmark at the Dock, that constrained him; it was rather the recollection of his own careful scrutiny of the disputed canvas, when he had at last dragged himself with a disagreeable sense of moral responsibility into Burlington House, and had come away at last strangely dissatisfied. Acquitting Dick of any conscious plagiarism, of a breach of common honesty, he was disagreeably filled with a sense of the work's immeasurable inferiority to Oswyn's ruined masterpiece. It was clever, and audacious, and striking; it had had the fortune to be splendidly hung, and that was all, for all his goodwill, he could say. And since, after all, that was so little, would strike his friend as but a cold tribute after the panegyrics of the morning papers, he preferred to say nothing, deftly dropping the subject, and responding to the first half of his friend's question alone. "My domain, Dick? Ah, I forgot; you can hardly have heard that it is my domain no longer--or ceases to be very shortly. That has come to an end; I have sold it." Lightmark whistled softly. "Well, you surprise me! Of course I am glad; we will be glad too. We shall see more of you now, I suppose? or will you live abroad?" "Abroad?" echoed Rainham absently. "Oh, yes, very probably. But tell me, how is--Eve?" "As we seem to be arriving, I think I will let her tell you herself."