It was a strange history, that of the friendship between these two young women, so different in birth and surroundings. Eleanor's father, Angus Irvine, the son of a small Scotch farmer, had at an early age evinced such artistic talent as to attract the attention of the old Lord Stortford, the great landowner of the district, who purchased two or three of the young lad's early sketches, and better still, furnished him with the means of establishing himself for two or three years as an art student in Rome. The good which the young man here did for himself (on his first arrival his tastes and sympathies, quickened by the ever-present daily surroundings, so fired his eye and nerved his hand that old Roman colonists, whose judgment had been tempered by time and experience, predicted the greatest things of him) was not without a certain counterbalance of evil. The loose life led by many of his Bohemian companions, the gatherings at the Caffè Greco, the _soirées intimes_ of men and women at which he was a constant guest, had a baleful effect on the hitherto strictly-kept Scottish youth, and his name was scarcely known in the art circles of Rome before a rumour ran round that Angus Irvine was following in the footsteps of so many other young men of promise, and was becoming dissipated, not to say drunken. The rumour was harsh and exaggerated, and it had an exaggerated and harsh effect. He was a mere boy after all, this gaunt beardless youth of two or three and twenty, and a few glasses of wine had unwonted power on one who, in the seclusion of his mountain home, had been brought up a strict abstainer; and had the censorious left him in peace, it is probable that, so far as the drink was concerned, he would soon have got the better of his newly-acquired freedom, and settled down to a steady plodding life. As it was, when he learned--as he did speedily--that his conduct had become the subject of conversation amongst a certain set, he received the news with an outbreak of wrath, which, cooling down, was supplanted by a sturdy Scotch obstinacy, under which he determined to 'gang his ain gait,' and to treat the animadversion of his detractors with contempt. He laboured fitfully thenceforward, turning out now brilliant work, now pictures which, though undeniably possessing genius, were hurried and scamped; his doing of that which he ought not to have done was more regular, while his drinking was harder than ever.