The cigarette case, which Rainham handed to his guest, was a well-worn leather one, a somewhat ladylike article, with a photograph fitted into the dividing flap inside. Before answering the question he looked at the photograph absently for a moment, when the case had been returned to him. "It's not a very good photograph. It's meant for--for Mrs. Lightmark, when she was a little girl. She gave me the case with the portrait years ago, in Florence." Oswyn glanced at him curiously and shrewdly through a thin haze of blue smoke, watching him restore the faded, little receptacle almost reverentially to the breast-pocket of his coat. "Have you been to the Chamber of Horrors?" he asked suddenly, after a silent pause, broken only by the ceaseless lashing of the window by the raindrops. Rainham looked up with a start, half puzzled, seeking and finding an explanation in the faint, conscious humour which loosened the lines about the speaker's mouth. "The Chamber of---- Do you mean the R.A.? You do, you most irreverent of mortals! No, I have not been yet. Will you go with me?" "Heaven forbid! I have been once." "You have? And they didn't scalp you?" "I didn't stay long enough, I suppose. I only went to see one picture--Lightmark's." "Ah, that's just what I want to see! And you know I still have a weakness for the show. I expect you would like the new Salon better." "There are good things there," said Oswyn tersely, "and a great many abominations as well. I was over in Paris last week." Rainham glanced at him over his cup with a certain surprise. "I didn't know you ever went there now," he remarked. "No, I never go if I can help it. I hate Paris; it is _triste_ as a well, and full of ghosts. Ghosts! It's a city of the dead. But I had a picture there this time, and I went to look at it." "In the new Salon?" "In the new Salon. It was a little gray, dusky thing, three foot by two, and their flaming miles of canvas murdered it. I am not a scene-painter," he went on a little savagely. "I don't paint with a broom, and I have no ambition to do the sun, or an eruption of Vesuvius. So I doubt if I shall exhibit there again until the vogue alters. Oh, they are clever enough, those fellows! even the trickiest of them can draw, which is the last thing they learn here, and one or two are men of genius. But I should dearly like to set them down, _en plein air_ too, if they insist upon it, with the palette of Velasquez. I went out and wandered in the Morgue afterwards, and I confess its scheme of colour rested my eyes." "Do I know your picture?" asked Rainham to change the subject, finding him a little grim. "Is it the thing you were doing here?" Oswyn's head rested on one thin, colour-stained hand which shaded his eyes. "No," he said with a suggestion of constraint, "it was an old sketch which I had worked up--not the thing you knew. I shall not finish that----"