When Laurie got home to Kensington Gore the first thing he saw was the drawing on the mantel-piece of the Three Princes, or the Three Paths. He took it down and examined it, not without a certain complacency. No doubt it was a clever drawing. Then he took his pencil with a sudden suggestion in his mind. Somehow since he drew it his own figure seemed to him scarcely dignified enough for the subject:--it was too comic, with all those traps festooned about it. He took his pencil, as I have said, and put lightly in, half-way between himself and the National Gallery, a shadow of a figure with one arm stretched out towards him. Not a sylph like that fairy form which he had pictured on the rocks Ben was climbing. This was a full, mature, matron figure, Friendship, steadfast and sweet, not beckoning the hero on to the delights of life, but holding out a helping hand. A hand may be very strong and helpful and sustaining, though it is soft and fair and delicate. This thought passed through Laurie’s mind as he indicated by a line or two the gracious, open, extended palm. Alas! no sylph,--not her of the little letters who might have been all the world to Laurie,--but Friendship, the only feminine presence that could ever enter his existence. He sighed as he put in this new personage in the drama, yet hung over it all the same, feeling that even this lent an interest to his own path. Not glory and a coronet which Frank, no doubt, as a soldier had his chance of winning; not wealth and honour which more naturally and certainly would come to Ben;--but the National Gallery finally, and Friendship on the way to give him a hand. Such were to be the special characteristics of Laurie’s way through the world. CHAPTER XIX. CHARLOTTE STREET, FITZROY SQUARE.