Later in the afternoon he went out; rather like a person who has reasons for leaving inconspicuously. He had made a great, a critical resolve. He passed furtively down Werter Road into the High Street, and then stood a moment outside Stawley's stationery shop, which is also a library, an emporium of leather-bags, and an artists'-colourman's. He entered Stawley's blushing, trembling--he a man of fifty who could not see his own toes--and asked for certain tubes of colour. An energetic young lady who seemed to know all about the graphic arts endeavoured to sell to him a magnificent and complicated box of paints, which opened out into an easel and a stool, and contained a palette of a shape preferred by the late Edwin Long, R.A., a selection of colours which had been approved by the late Lord Leighton, P.R.A., and a patent drying-oil which (she said) had been used by Whistler. Priam Farll got away from the shop without this apparatus for the confection of masterpieces, but he did not get away without a sketching-box which he had had no intention of buying. The young lady was too energetic for him. He was afraid of being too curt with her lest she should turn on him and tell him that pretence was useless--she knew he was Priam Farll. He felt guilty, and he felt that he looked guilty. As he hurried along the High Street towards the river with the paint-box it appeared to him that policemen observed him inimically and cocked their helmets at him, as who should say: "See here; this won't do. You're supposed to be in Westminster Abbey. You'll be locked up if you're too brazen." The tide was out. He sneaked down to the gravelly shore a little above the steamer pier, and hid himself between the piles, glancing around him in a scared fashion. He might have been about to commit a crime. Then he opened the sketch-box, and oiled the palette, and tried the elasticity of the brushes on his hand. And he made a sketch of the scene before him. He did it very quickly--in less than half-an-hour. He had made thousands of such colour 'notes' in his life, and he would never part with any of them. He had always hated to part with his notes. Doubtless his cousin Duncan had them now, if Duncan had discovered his address in Paris, as Duncan probably had. When it was finished, he inspected the sketch, half shutting his eyes and holding it about three feet off. It was good. Except for a few pencil scrawls done in sheer absent-mindedness and hastily destroyed, this was the first sketch he had made since the death of Henry Leek. But it was very good. "No mistake who's done that!" he murmured; and added: "That's the devil of it. Any expert would twig it in a minute. There's only one man that could have done it. I shall have to do something worse than that!" He shut up the box and with a bang as an amative couple came into sight. He need not have done so, for the couple vanished instantly in deep disgust at being robbed of their retreat between the piles.