“I cannot stay in the house with Lady Strange,” said Brydon in a low voice, “I couldn’t. If I am not clean enough to work at my Art I am certainly not fit to eat and drink in her presence. I didn’t stay in my father’s house until my mother and sisters had gone away, and—Lady Strange, somehow, is divine to me. She is always the bride in that picture. I think,” he continued, with a strange softness in his voice, “for all her jeering at me, that I have painted the real woman.” It was Strange’s turn to wince this time. “Look here, Strange,” the boy went on, still softly and with lowered head, “I finished that picture before I went into the sty. I wouldn’t have touched her with a dirty brush.” “My dear fellow, I know it! I should have liked you to have stayed with us. At any rate you will stay in London for a few days; I will be your banker, of course; it will be, after all, only a very trifling increase of your debt to me, and there’s plenty of time to pay that in.” He took hold of the fellow’s arm and swung him round. “It’s getting late,” he said, “and I want to see the picture to-night.” They walked on in silence, the boy’s chivalrous adoration of his wife touched Strange sharply. All the same, he felt vastly inclined to turn round and punch his head for it. “How dared the fellow go speculating on her possibilities!” he thought; “that is my business. “Yet when one comes to think of it, I’m an ass, I might just as well go for the dozens of others whose admiration is quite as vicarious. It’s not Gwen one of the lot goes mad over, it’s her double. Heigh ho! Bigamy’s an awful embarrassment.” “I tried to keep exactly to Nature in that last picture of Lady Strange,” said Brydon, as he set to unfastening the packing of his picture. “You succeeded,” said Strange. Brydon looked round. “You didn’t like it then—no more did I, I tried too hard to be faithful to the order.” “Well, and so you were, and that was what was wanted of you. Mrs. Waring, for whom the portrait was intended, liked it tremendously,” said Strange shortly. “Damn the fellow’s impudence!” he thought. Brydon continued his cutting and unwinding, painfully red in the face. When it was all undone he waited for a moment before he removed the last covering, then he pulled it off with a quick soft movement, and from a vague feeling of half shy delicacy he turned aside and began to cut up tobacco diligently. When Strange saw his wife, not the cold living abstraction, but a warm, big-hearted, divinely-natural creature, alive there on the canvas before him, a sudden soft gush of tears flooded his eyes, and he shook and reeled at the queer warm shock of them. “Brydon,” he said, turning round suddenly, “one makes a fool of oneself over her, it is a tribute to your genius.” Brydon looked at him and hesitated, then he said in a half-fearful tone, looking away,