"They might make me an Associate next year, if my work was a little better," he told her; "but I am not good enough to hit the public taste two years running. It was the subject or the devilry in my picture that caught on. I might never catch on again--and I'm sick of it all--the critics, the dealers, and the whole brotherhood of art." There again his road in life came to a dead stop; but this time it was not a wicked woman's form that barred the vista, and shut out the Temple of Fame. As he had missed being a great soldier, he was to miss being a famous painter, though the men who knew, the men who had already arrived, had told his mother that a brilliant career might have been his, if he had chosen to work for it; to work, not by fits and starts, like a fine gentleman in a picturesque painting-room, but as Reynolds had worked, and Etty, and Wilkie, when he sat on the floor painting, with his own legs for his subject. Again, after trying her powers of persuasion, and trying to fire his ambition, Mrs. Rutherford had resigned herself to disappointment, and had been neither reproachful nor lugubrious. She was an ambitious woman, and her son had disappointed her ambition. She was a deeply religious woman, and she saw her son indifferent to his religion, if not an unbeliever; and she never persecuted him with tears and remonstrances, only on rare occasions, and with the utmost delicacy, pleading the urgency of a strong faith in the midst of a faithless generation, and the deadly risk the man runs who neglects the sacraments of his Church. Although she did not often approach this subject in her talk with Claude, it was not the less a subject of anxious thought; and she relied on the influence of her old and devoted friend, Father Cyprian Hammond, rather than her own, for the saving of her son's soul. If a good woman's prayers could have guarded his path and kept him from temptation, Claude Rutherford would have walked between guardian angels. CHAPTER VIII While Claude Rutherford's peril was a subject of troubled thought for his mother and her friend and father confessor, Cyprian Hammond, no friendly voice had breathed words of warning into Vera's ear; nor had she any consciousness that warning was needed, or that danger threatened.