At last, after ten years of hard work, struggles, and disappointments, he began to enjoy a measure of success. He and Gethryn saw little of each other this winter, excepting at Julien’s. That last visit to the Rue Monsieur le Prince was never mentioned between them. They were as cordial when they met as ever, but Braith did not visit his young friend any more, and Gethryn never spoke to him of Yvonne. “Good-bye, old chap!” Braith would say when they parted, gripping Rex’s hand and smiling at him. But Rex did not see Braith’s face as he walked away. Braith felt helpless. The thing he most dreaded for Rex had happened; he believed he could see the end of it all, and yet he could prevent nothing. If he should tell Rex that he was being ruined, Rex would not listen, and—who was he that he should preach to another man for the same fault by which he had wasted his own life? No, Rex would never listen to him, and he dreaded a rupture of their friendship. Gethryn had made his debut in the Salon with a certain amount of éclat. True, he had been disappointed in his expectations of a medal, but a first mention had soothed him a little, and, what was more important, it proved to be the needed sop to his discontented aunt. But somehow or other his new picture did not progress rapidly, or in a thoroughly satisfactory manner. In bits and spots it showed a certain amount of feverish brilliancy, yes, even mature solidity; in fact, it was nowhere bad, but still it was not Gethryn and he knew that. “Confound it!” he would mutter, standing back from his canvas; but even at such times he could hardly help wondering at his own marvelous technique. “Technique be damned! Give me stupidity in a pupil every time, rather than cleverness,” Harrington had said to one of his pupils, and the remark often rang in Gethryn’s ears even when his eyes were most blinded by his own wonderful facility. “Some fools would medal this,” he thought; “but what pleasure could a medal bring me when I know how little I deserve it?” Perhaps he was his own hardest critic, but it was certain that the old, simple honesty, the subtle purity, the almost pathetic effort to tell the truth with paint and brush, had nearly disappeared from Gethryn’s canvases during the last eight months, and had given place to a fierce and almost startling brilliancy, never, perhaps, hitting, but always threatening some brutal note of discord. Even Elise looked vaguely troubled, though she always smiled brightly at Gethryn’s criticism of his own work. “It is so very wonderful and dazzling, but—but the color seems to me—unkind.” And he would groan and answer, “Yes, yes, Elise, you’re right; oh, I can never paint another like the one of last June!” “Ah, that!” she would cry, “that was delicious—” but checking herself, she would add, “Courage, let us try again; I am not tired, indeed I am _not._”