He looked at the tall dilapidated walls showing above the dark green of the elder bushes, and lingered, for it was a soft blue summer's day with just a breeze stirring, and the corn waved yellow, and the dim expanses of the Downs extended in faint lines and dim tints. When he entered his studio his colour scheme pleased him, and looking at the rafters he thought that the stained wood was handsome and appropriate. The grey carpet was soft under foot, and the lustre and form of a grand piano suggested Chopin and Schubert. His studio seemed to him a symbol of his own refinement, and being moved, perhaps, by the silence and the quiet of the north light, he took his violin, and turning from time to time to look on himself on the glass or his picture on the easel, he played Stradella's “Chanson d'Eglise.” Then seeing, or rather thinking he saw, how he could improve his landscape, he took up his palette, and in a desultory and uncertain fashion he painted till five o'clock. “It is no use,” he thought, “I can do nothing with it until I get a model, but the devil of it is, there are no models in Brighton--at least, I don't know where to go and look for one, and it is no use asking Sally or Maggie to sit. They'll sit for five minutes, and then say they have some work to do at home, and must be off. You must have a professional model, a girl you pay a shilling an hour--I might sling the hammock from there to here--I wonder where I could get a girl who would do. I can't have a girl off the street; she must be more or less respectable--I wonder whom I can get. That girl in the bar-room at the station would do.” Putting his palette away with a lazy gesture, he thought for a few minutes of Lizzie Baker. What had become of her? And why had she disappeared? It was nearly a year and a half ago now. What a jolly day up the river! All the beauty of the flowing water, the crowning woods and whispering rushes filled his mind, and yielding to the moment's emotion he took some verses out of an escritoire and altered several lines. Another abandoning the search for a suitable rhyme he turned to a portrait of Maggie which he had begun a few days before. She stood in a pose that was habitual to her--her hands linked behind her, the head leaned on one side, the little black eyes--but not ugly eyes--fixed in a sweet subtle and enquiring look. The thinness, and, indeed, the angularity of her figure was almost powerfully indicated with broad lines of paint and charcoal. It was Frank's most successful effort. He knew this, and he said to himself, “Not half bad, very like her, quite the character; the drawing is right, if I could only go on with it; if I could only model the face. I see very well where I shall get into trouble--that shadow about the neck, the jawbone, the cheekbone, and then all that rich colour about the eyes.” Then he thought he would walk over to the Manor House, and he must hasten, for it was half-past five, and tea was always ready in the verandah.