‘What can any one do put a stop to it?’ said one of the young men. ‘We have no private patrons now-a-days. We have only got the public and the press, to do our best with them. Laurie Renton draws very well for an amateur; I hope he will not end in the “Sword.”’ ‘Laurie Renton was born an amateur,’ said Spyer; ‘he never was anything better, and couldn’t be. Let him take to writing. That’s what heaps of people do after coquetting with art. He may make something of that; but he never will paint a picture that has any chance to live.’ ‘He draws very well, all the same,’ said Laurie’s defender. But on the whole, though it gained him an amount of respect and importance among them, his little attempt at literature did not raise Laurie’s reputation. It looked like a defection to the painters round him. Though it was but for once, and took up but two columns in the ‘Sword,’ he was given up as having gone over to literature, which, in the opinion of the Clipstone Street fellows, was a very easy and well-rewarded trade. Suffolk himself did not quite know what to think. He lost not a moment in going to see his critic, and thanking him for the good word he had said for him. But yet he was a little unwilling to acknowledge that it was Laurie’s paper which brought that picture-dealer to see him. The very next week after, the ‘Looker-on’ had a notice of the Hydrographic, and followed Laurie’s lead, praising the picture with still greater effusion than he had allowed himself; and even Mrs. Suffolk, when she saw this, was moved in her heart by a momentary feeling that Laurie had been very measured and even cold, in his approbation. She was grateful, and so was her husband,--but----. There was a degree of pleasure in their satisfaction with the ‘Looker-on,’ which was wanting in their gratitude to Laurie. Gratitude is a cumbrous thing to move about with. And Laurie felt that even the padrona expected him, now he had begun, to go on writing articles. One morsel of print implied to all these innocent people an engagement on the ‘Sword’ at least, and ready entry into literature in general. If he had gone on writing, and stood up like a man for his friends, the society which surrounded him would have felt that he had done his duty. But there seemed to all his comrades a certain cowardice in contenting himself with one effort. That he should have exerted himself on Suffolk’s account was quite comprehensible; but to stop there, and do nothing further, and say no good word for anybody else! It was that he did not choose to take the trouble, people thought,--not even for the padrona;--for nobody suspected that Laurie would have been torn by wild horses rather than have put her sacred name into profane print. This was a refinement of sentiment which no man could be expected to enter into. Mrs. Severn herself was perhaps a little disappointed too. It would have been but natural that she, his closest friend, to whom he came with all his troubles, should reap the