the eye that sought to estimate its depths. And his temperament--that one thing that can never be taught. Karl Rusoff knew he had never come across a temperament that, artistically speaking, approached it. It was, indeed, not less than perfect from that point of view, sensitive, impressionable, divinely susceptible to beauty, hating (here largely was the personal charm of it to his master), hating the second-rate, especially the skilful second-rate, with glorious intensity. At the thought Karl’s rather grim face relaxed into a smile as he remembered how Martin had sat down to the piano the other day in a sudden burst of Handel-hatred and with his ten fingers, which sounded like twenty, and a strangely unmelodious voice, which sounded like a crow and ranged from high falsetto treble to the note of kettledrums, had given a rendering of the “Hail-Stone Chorus,” so ludicrous, yet catching so unerringly the cheap tumult of that toy-storm in a teacup, that he himself had sat and laughed till his eyes were dim. “And why,” asked Martin, dramatically, in conclusion, “did that German spend his long and abandoned life in England? Because he knew, sir, he knew that in any other country he would have been kindly but firmly put over the border. Now shall I sing you the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’?” Besides this facility in technique, the power of perception of beauty, which in many of the finest minds requires years of delicate cultivation before it becomes at all mature or certain, was already present in Martin in apparent fulness of growth; it was already an instinct exerting and asserting itself, not through habit, but through intuition. It was so much the dominating ingredient in the composition known as Martin Challoner that almost everything else might be considered as a mere by-product. His whole will, his whole energy, was at its service. When once it called to him, as it had called to him in his adoption of the Roman faith, it seemed he had to obey and could not question. It was to him a law that he could not transgress.