Wyndham had finished his purchases, and was telling the assistant to send the parcel to his studio. As they left the shop presently, Sadler pressed Wyndham very hard to lunch with him at a particular restaurant he mentioned, and Wyndham could not do otherwise than accept the invitation, though he confessed the place was unknown to him. Whereat Sadler expressed great astonishment. It was one of the very few places in London where the food was fit to eat! Why, the cooking was even better than at Lavenue's in the Quarter, and that was saying a great deal. He, Sadler, could not endure any other place during his sojournings in London. Wyndham let the dear fellow gallop on to his heart's content. Sadler was a fine painter, and in the old days Wyndham as the junior had sat at his feet, and in the matter of technique had been greatly indebted to him. But he had observed with covert amusement at a very early stage in the acquaintanceship that Sadler, like so many others in the hard-working, hand-to-mouth world of the arts, had an amiable weakness for "being in the know" anent the good things of life, and affected a lavishness in public that was off-set by a sharp economy in the less visible phases of his existence. At the restaurant Sadler scrutinised the carte with the confident eye of a man about town, grumbled a little, held a fussy colloquy with the waiter, and finally ordered oysters and chablis to begin upon, the while a chateaubriand was being prepared for them. Over the meal Sadler talked a great deal of old times. He seemed to have kept himself well in touch with scores of men they had known in common, despite scatterings and vicissitudes. His mind kept leaping across the world, beating them all out of their lairs for Wyndham's enlightenment. Did he remember Pycherley--the biggest duffer of them all? Well, he had married an heiress on the strength of his genius, and was painting awful stuff out in California; and Snyders, who had shared his studio, had built himself a Moorish house high up on a mountain-side overlooking the Gulf of Salerno; a third had settled down to "black-and-white" in a queer little creeper-clad house in St. John's Wood; a fourth was decorating a municipal building at Toronto. Marlowe was still in the avenue du Maine, where the fascinating American actress he had wed had since borne him a sheaf of daughters: and the beautiful Mrs. Smith they had known at Fontainebleau, the summer they had spent there together, had long ago divorced her husband, and married the Italian sculptor, in whose studio she had made such sensational progress. She now exhibited regularly, and had already received a gold medal of the second class.