The picture represented a modern ballroom, in a corner of which a man of middle age, his arms tightly folded across his breast, was intently watching the movements of a young girl, just starting off in a _valse_ with a handsome dashing young partner. The expressions in the two faces were admirably defined: in the man's was a deep earnest devotion not unmingled with passion and with jealousy, his tightly-clenched mouth, his deep-set earnest eyes, settled in rapt adoration on the girl, showed the earnestness of his feeling, SO did the rigidly-fixed arms, and the _pose_ of the figure, which, originally careless, had become hardened and angular through intensity of feeling. The contrast was well marked; in the girl's face which was turned toward the man while her eyes were fixed on him, was a bright saucy triumph, brightening her eyes, inflating her little nostrils, curving the corners of her mouth, while her figure was light and airy, just obedient to the first notes of the _valse_, balancing itself as it were on the arm of her partner before starting off down the dance. All the accessories were admirable: the dreary wallflowers ranged round the room, the chaperons nidnodding together on the rout-seats, paterfamilias despondingly consulting his watch, the wearied hostess, and the somnolently-inclined musicians,--all were there, portrayed not merely by a facile hand but by a man conversant with society. The title of the picture, "Sic vos non vobis," was written on a bit of paper stuck into the frame, on the other corner of which was a card bearing the words "Mr. Geoffrey Ludlow." "Ah!" said Stompff, who, after carefully scanning the picture close and then from a distance, had read the card--"at last! Geoffrey Ludlow's going to fulfil the promise which he's been showing this ten years! A late birth, but a fine babby now it's born! That's the real thing and no flies! That's about as near a good thing as I've seen this long time--that; come, you'll say the same! That's a good picture, Mr. Wrigley!" "Ah!" said old Tom, coming up at the moment, "you've made another lucky hit if you've bought that, Mr. Stompff! Geoff is so confoundedly undecided, so horribly weak in all things, that he's been all this time making up his mind whether he really would paint a good picture or not. But he's decided at last, and he has painted a clipper."