"Lady Jocelyn would very much like to see the pictures you have scattered about in this room, my dear father," he said, "if you have no objection to our turning them over?" The old man chuckled and nodded. "You'll find 'em gentlemanly," he said; "you'll find 'em all more or less gentlemanly." "You're sure you don't remember painting the portrait of a Mr. Dunbar?" Mr. Kerstall the younger said, bending over his father's chair as he spoke. "Try again, father—try to remember—Henry Dunbar, the son of Percival Dunbar, the great banker." Mr. Kerstall senior, who never left off smiling, nodded and chuckled, and scratched his head, and seemed to plunge into a depth of profound thought. Laura began to hope again. "I remember painting Sir Jasper Rivington, who was Lord Mayor in the year—bless my heart how the dates do slip out of my mind, to be sure!—I remember painting _him_, in his robes too; yes, sir—by gad, sir, his official robes. He'd liked me to have painted him looking out of the window of his state-coach, sir, bowing to the populace on Ludgate Hill, with the dome of St. Paul's in the background; but I told him the notion wasn't practicable, sir; I told him it couldn't be done, sir; I——" Laura looked despairingly at Mr. Kerstall the younger. "May we see the pictures?" she asked. "I am sure that I shall recognize my father's portrait, if by any chance it should be amongst them." "We will set to work at once, then," the artist said, briskly. "We're going to look at your pictures, father." Unframed canvases, and unfinished sketches on millboard, were lying about the room in every direction, piled against the wall, heaped on side-tables, and stowed out of the way upon shelves, and everywhere the dust lay thick upon them. "It was quite a chamber of horrors," Mr. Kerstall the younger said, gaily: for it was here that he banished his own failures; his sketches for his pictures that were to be painted upon some future occasion; carelessly-drawn groups that he meant some day to improve upon; finished pictures that he had been unable to sell; and all the other useless litter of an artist's studio. There were a great many dingy performances of Mr. Kerstall senior; very classical, and extremely uninteresting; studies from the life, grey and chalky and muscular, with here and there a knotty-looking foot or a lumpy arm, in the most unpleasant phases of foreshortening. There were a good many portraits, gentlemanly to the last degree; but poor Laura looked in vain for the face she wanted to see—the hard cold face, as she fancied it must have been in youth.