out what this extraordinary sudden commotion, for which his mind seemed only partially responsible, could be. This was what had in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, occurred to the painter. He had, of course, been aware of it before without giving any particular importance to the fact. The fact, indeed, in a precarious, uncertain profession like his, in which a piece of good fortune might occur at any moment, was really not of the first importance; but it flashed upon him now in a significance and with a force which no such thing had ever held before. It was this--that when he had completed the little picture upon which he was working he had no other commission of any kind on hand. It sounds very prosaic to be a thing capable of giving such a tragic shot--but it was not prosaic. One can even conceive circumstances in which despair and death might be in such words; and to no one in Mr. Sandford’s position could they be pleasant. Even if the fact represented no material loss, it would represent loss--which at his age could never be made up--loss of acceptance, loss of position, that kind of failure which is popularly represented as being “shelved,” put aside as a thing that is done with; always a keen and grievous pang. But to our painter the words meant more than that. They meant a cutting off of the ground from under his feet, a sudden arrest of everything, a full stop, which in his fully flowing liberal life was a tragic horror and impossibility, a something far more terrible than death. It had upon him something of the character of a paralytic stroke. His hand, as we have said, stopped work sharply, suddenly; it trembled, and the brush with which he was painting fell from it; his limbs tottered under him, his under lip dropped, his heart gave a leap and then a dead pause. He stumbled backwards for a few steps and sank into a chair.