Only once in all his life has Little Yeogh Wough's love ever seemed to fail me, and that was at just about the time when his Public School career was coming to a close. I had done a thing that I hardly ever do. I had defied one of my superstitions. And I had been punished for doing it. My husband had asked me to let him paint my portrait. He had been asking me the same thing for years past, and I had always refused, remembering the injunction that: "Thou shalt not make to thyself the likeness of anything that is in the heavens above or the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth." Of course I know there are sophistical people who make a point of mixing this commandment up with the sentence that follows it and pretending that it's only the bowing down and worshipping that are forbidden. But I know better. I have seen times without number the fate that has followed the person who, not being a royal personage or an actor or an actress, or a Lord Mayor, has indulged in the arrogant joy of having his portrait painted. These exceptions that I have made are safe enough, because it is, as it were, a part of their business in life to have their portraits painted, as well as their photographs taken. "It is really such an absurd idea of yours," my husband said to me. "It's all the purest nonsense. Of course a lot of people die directly they have had their portraits painted, but that's mainly because they're usually getting on for a hundred before they can afford to pay anybody to do them." "There may certainly be something in that," I agreed. "And I will admit this much--that I don't think this superstition applies completely to people who don't believe in it. But unluckily I do believe in it. Still, your not being a professional artist may make a difference. If you'll promise to do the thing very badly, so that fate may not know it's meant for me, I'll let you do it." I don't think there was any particular reason why fate should have known that the picture was meant for me. Indeed, one of our friends, a well-known novelist, cried out directly he caught sight of the first sketch and before he knew whom it was meant to be, that it was the best portrait he'd ever seen of his dear and lifelong companion the late Henry Irving. Anyhow, as the painting progressed, I did what was for me an extraordinary thing--I caught influenza. And, as the picture grew and grew, I got worse and worse, until I very nearly died of oedema of the lungs. Little Yeogh Wough was written to and told all about it. His reply was a telegram to his father in the following words: "Pray convey my deepest sympathy.--ROLAND." "Pray convey my deepest sympathy.--ROLAND!" He has never forgotten that telegram from that day to this. He has prayed to forget it, and has never been able to. It did me more good than twenty doctors could have done. I sat up in bed and threw a dressing-gown round my shoulders and surveyed the blank faces of the other occupants of the room.