Well--it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was, through it all and in spite of it all--as he had been through, and in spite of, his pictures--so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your work!" But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check. "This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly--above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a studio. The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break with his old life. "Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity. "Never," he said briefly. "Or water-colour--or etching?" His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their handsome sunburn. "Never think of it, my dear fellow--any more than if I'd never touched a brush." And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything else. I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece--the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room. "Oh, by Jove!" I said. It was a sketch of a donkey--an old tired donkey, standing in the rain under a wall. "By Jove--a Stroud!" I cried. He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little quickly. "What a wonder! Made with a dozen lines--but on everlasting foundations. You lucky chap, where did you get it?" He answered slowly: "Mrs. Stroud gave it to me." "Ah--I didn't know you even knew the Strouds. He was such an inflexible hermit." "I didn't--till after.... She sent for me to paint him when he was dead." "When he was dead? You?" I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter." "Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?" "That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever knew." "You ever knew? But you just said--" Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes. "Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead." I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"