state of sensibility, all round, at which we increasingly assist. The thing is done for the prospective bride--though she would have been much more likely to have been treated to a fine miniature (alas, but no matter!) And don't I see that the first stroke in the reaction, on her part, as I may conveniently call it, is her abrupt, her sudden inconsequent refusal of the gift? in which she is backed by her mother. Perhaps she refuses it even before it is quite finished--for I want the artist to have spoken about it to the little H.W. man, so to put it, while the work is still in progress; which is also the time of the latter's opening himself about it (as Ralph "makes out") to the two women. Here I have something--the picture's having been destined for the big panel over the principal drawing-room--whereas the place in which my hero finds it in 1910 is the small inner retreat which I have handled in Book II. The mother and daughter startle Ralph, in 1820, by their expression of unwillingness to its hanging where it was intended; but as I want it still on the premises, want some compromise or right thing done about it, so that it shall be there for 1910, I see as arrangeable the business, the tension, the whole significant passage, of its being relegated to the place where everyone concerned will least see it--short of its being turned out of the house; a circumstance I _don't_ invoke. I have it there for the other man, as his own portrait, when he is restored to his time by Ralph's liberation from it; I have it there because I want him _in_ it, don't you see? for that wonder over it in which Ralph is held during his night of 1910. The other man comes back, the other man is _in_ it, in order to carry out his part--well, of what I have recorded.