He flung himself upon the paper, thrusting away all the painful enlightenments and contradictions of his life as he thrust away the gay-coloured spike of the gladiolus. He would have crushed them under foot if he had been able, but this he could not do. They would not disappear from his memory as the others did from his table. Thus he worked on, with a fervour which was almost savage, while Paul, with a proud smile on his face, handled the glue-pot. After a while the mere sense of companionship mollified the elder man. He was wounded, and wanted just such soothing as the sight of his disciple sitting quietly by gave him. His work grew less firm, his hand less rigid; the great pencil ceased to dig into the paper with its violent lines. Insensibly the softening went on. First, he threw a hasty glance from beneath his bushy eyebrows at the young man tranquilly seated near him. Then his fiery inspiration slackened; he paused to look at his model, to devise the next line, and doing so let his eyes rest upon Paul with a growing softness. At last he got up, threw down his pencil, and coming up to his companion struck him on the shoulder. “Well!” he said. “Boy! So that was how it was. You listened to the father--old fool! but your thoughts were with the girl. That was how it was.” This was not the thing that gnawed at Spears’s heart, but he put it forward by way perhaps of persuading himself, as we all do sometimes, that it was the lesser matter that hurt him most. Paul paused in his work, and looked up. His face was very serious, with none of that glow of happiness in it which belongs to an accepted lover--as the man beside him, who had been a true lover himself, was quick to see. “Who said that? Not I, Spears--not I.” “Who said it? Well, I cannot tell you. The women among them; they have their own way of looking at things.” And then the two men paused, looking at each other. This was the moment in which it was natural that Janet’s lover should make his own explanation to the father of the girl whom he loved. The whole life of two people at least, and of many more in a secondary point of view, hung upon Paul’s lips, to be decided by the next impulse that might move him, by the next fantastic words which, out of the mist of unreal fact in which he had got himself enveloped, he might be moved to say. END OF VOL. I. LONDON: R. CLAY, SONS, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.