He walked with Mendel as far as Gray's Inn, and there left him, saying he had another picture-buying flat to go and see, and after that he must pay a visit to Uncle Cluny and keep him up to the mark. He was in fine fettle, and went off singing at the top of his voice. Mendel bought some flowers on the way home because he wished always to have flowers, even if she were to send no more. He was sure of himself to-day. He was in love and glad to be in love. Surely it could have no worse suffering than that through which he had passed, and if it did, well, so much the worse for him. . . . He was glad it had happened. His father would not be able to sneer at him any more, as he was always sneering at Issy and Harry--Harry, who had deserted his father and mother for the sweetbreads of Paris. (Jacob always called sweetmeats sweetbreads.) He had a bitter, biting tongue, had Jacob, and the habit of using it was growing on him. Mendel knew that he had deserved many of his sneers, but now they could touch him no longer. His life, like his art, now contained a passion as strong as any Jacob had known in his life, and stronger, because it was wedded to beauty, to which Jacob was a stranger. He was able to work again at his picture of his father and mother. He could make something of it now, he knew, because he could understand his father and appreciate the strength in him which had kept his passion alive through poverty and a life of constant storms and upheavals. He remembered his father knocking down the schoolmaster, and the soldier in the inn with the heavy glass. Oh yes! Jacob was a strong man, and he had nearly died of love for Golda, the beautiful. He worked away with an extraordinary zest, and he knew that it was good. As he grew tired during the afternoon he was overcome with a great longing for her to see it, just to see it and to say she liked it. It would not matter much if she did not understand it, so long as she saw it and liked it. He turned to the roughly sketched portrait of her to ask her if she liked it, and as he did so the door opened and she came in. Her arms were full of flowers, so that her face was resting in them, her dear face, the sweetest of all flowers. "You said . . . you must see me, so I brought you these to say good-bye." "Do come in and see my picture. It is nearly finished." "Oh! It is good," she said shyly. "I thought you'd like it. I wanted you to like it. Do stay a little and talk." She sat down and looked about the studio, puckering up her eyebrows nervously and making her eyes very round and large. "You never told me how old you are," he said nervously. "I'm nineteen." "I'm twenty. Just twenty. How long are you going away for?" "I don't know. Until the winter, I expect." "What will you do there in the country? It is important that you should tell me, because I must know how to think of you. What shall you do? Is it a big house? Are you--are you rich?"