Uncle Luke, still pale and trembling with his great grief, grinned from ear to ear, and gazed upon the artist in pathetic admiration. Meantime White stood blinking benignly through his spectacles; at last Madeline caught his look, and returned it with no little astonishment. ‘This is Madlin,’ said Uncle Luke, gently. Thus introduced, Madeline dropped her eyes timidly, and gave a country curtsey, as she had been accustomed to do to the magnates of the village. CHAPTER VIII.--UNCLE LUKE IS BROKEN-HEARTED. It appeared on explanation that the notice on the outside door of the ‘studio’ was a common ruse of Mr. Marmaduke White whenever he desired perfect solitude, and when the visits of even friends and acquaintances, not to speak of ambassadors from certain adamantine creditors, would be considered irksome. Although White dwelt in a studio, he was not an artist--not, that is to say, an artist by profession, though he could paint a little, and had a very pretty feeling for colour. By profession he was a man of letters; by special taste and habit, a writer for the theatre. Some of his less ambitious plays had been acted with no little _éclat_, and everybody had thriven through them except the author. Others had failed, and these failures constituted his glory. They were really productions of considerable literary merit. In literary circles White was spoken of as a man of genius whose mission it was to revive ‘the poetical drama,’ but who had fallen on dark days, when the Muses, having discarded classic drapery altogether, had taken to fleshings and the _can-can_. He was a gentle creature, with as soft a heart as ever throbbed in human bosom, and as little power of managing his worldly affairs as of creating a profitable taste for dramas in ‘five acts and in blank verse.’ He lived in a studio, with one artist or another for a companion, not because the place was necessary for his vocation, but because he was naturally a Bohemian, and a studio was a thoroughly Bohemian sort of abode. He was forty years of age, unmarried, and unlikely to marry. The number of his follies could only have been measured by the number of his good deeds, and those were legion. To see him was to like him; to know him was to love him well.