“It is no tribute to my genius, it is that face! I never cried, I have roared and howled, you know, scores of times, but I never cried properly till I saw it; it is the strongest and the most touching woman’s face I ever saw.” “It is, and you have done infinite justice to it.” “I had to paint her as she was there, I couldn’t help myself, I shall never again do anything like it.” “What does Legrun say of it?” He was silent for a minute. “Did you think,” he asked at last, angrily, “that I did that for Legrun’s praise or blame? Did I paint _her_ to be torn limb from limb by those old steely eyes?” “As a matter of fact I did not expect anything half so sensible from you, but this—this,” he added slowly, with a spasm of infinite generosity, “this shall hang in the Academy.” “If it does,” said the boy, “I shall never touch a brush again.” “Well, we won’t discuss it now.” “Nor at any other time. I shouldn’t care a tuppenny damn, don’t you know, for any fame for which you had to suffer.” “There was no word of suffering to me, or to anyone else.” “Who said there was? But do you see the alterations I made,” he went on hurriedly, “I made you even vaguer than you were and served the parson in the same way, and that carpet in Waring church was too strong altogether, I got a piece of stem green stuff and substituted it.” “Well, it is a work of genius,” said Strange as he got into his coat. “I am not such a fool as to deny that, but _I_ didn’t paint it, you know. Here, you’ll break your neck on these stairs, let me light you. Good night, dear old man.” CHAPTER XXXIII. WHEN Mrs. Waring got the sketches of her children—for Strange had used almost physical force to compel Dacre to run over to Paris to sit to Brydon—the very first minute she found herself alone with them she cried her heart out over the two, then she sat herself down and systematically adored them. She had them hung in the library where she could see them from her writing-table and only for their weight she would have had them carried to her room every night. Mr. Waring, in his emotionless way, valued his daughter’s gift, but this chronic passion of adoration was beyond him. He had already borne much with divine patience; he had seen his wife carried away from his side for hours at a stretch, to waste her mind and soul in the duties of an ordinary squire’s wife, and she had come back to babble of babies in a way that made his blood run cold. He had caught her thoughts wandering at moments when the crisis of a discovery was setting in, and with tears in her eyes that the subject under discussion could in no wise account for. Ah, he had suffered in a thousand indefinable ways! But yet there were moments when he had her still, just as in the sweet old times, body and soul and brain, all to himself; when she still put out all the force of her keen fine intellect and saw, with her beautiful intuition, puzzles that had made his great man’s brain reel.