The younger men all chimed in, echoing the opinion of their senior. Graham looked incredulously from one to the other; there was no doubting their sincerity. Like many another before him, he knew not how to distinguish his successes from his failures. The old artist, who had all his life been on the eve of painting his great picture, underrated the value of the new picture, but he was not mistaken in placing The Lovers far above it. Graham looked at it for the first time in many weeks, with that impersonal criticism of his own work which is only possible to an artist when a certain period has elapsed after its creation, and the mind has been occupied with other interests. It was late that night when the artist returned to his room, after dining with his sculptor friend at a restaurant near by. The moonlight flooded the studio, lighting its farthest corner. It showed him the vases of rose-bloom and the dark-browed Circe on the wall; it showed him the blackened hearth, where the embers still smouldered. And what was that in the fireplace? A charred wooden frame with a heap of ashes lying ’twixt its sides. Graham sprang forward with a cry of apprehension, and lifted the blistered frame. His fear had not been groundless: this bit of wood and that handful of cinders were all that remained of his great new picture! He gave a deep groan and staggered back against the wall. Before him, on the easel, gleaming through the pure silver light, was the picture of The Lovers. Millicent’s dreamy face, radiant with hope and love, smiled at him from the arms of the lover who now stood, half crazed with grief, gazing at the ruin before him. The young sculptor stood beside him, full of a sympathy he knew not how to express. At last he spoke:-- "Graham, look up, and do not grieve for what is past help. I tell you, man, that your greatest picture stands before you. The Lovers has the one quality which your work has heretofore missed. It is human, it is full of natural sentiment. It does not appeal to an aristocracy of thought, but to all men and all women, learned and untaught. I know not what influence swayed you in this picture, but I know that it lifted you to a higher plane than you had before attained. I care not for the loss of your Poet; it told me nothing of you that I did not know before; it was a step backwards to the time when you made that wondrous wicked Circe with her herd of swine. Let it go, and submit to the influence which inspired this picture, for which the world is richer to-day than for a score of such works as the other."