'Any friend of his will be welcome,' said Mr. Chadwick. 'I like Eardley, and I like his pictures, though I don't quite understand them; but he puts in plenty of colour; and though I wish he wouldn't paint so many people without their clothes, I--' 'James!' whispered his wife; and at that moment the door was thrown open, and the butler announced Mr. Eardley and Mr. Huff. It was not, however, under that name that Mr. Eardley introduced his friend to the hostess. 'Let me present to you Sir Nugent Uffington, my dear Mrs. Chadwick,' said he; 'a friend whose acquaintance I made under strange circumstances in a wild place several years ago, and to whose kindness and attention I owe my life.' 'Pray don't believe a word of this, Mrs. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a somewhat cynical smile; 'our friend Eardley carries that romantic spirit which is so invaluable to him in his painting into his daily life, and unconsciously allows it to colour his utterances. His recovery was due rather to my medicine-chest than to my exertions, and there was nothing wonderful about it.' 'You say that out of courtesy, Sir Nugent, but I have heard Mr. Eardley speak of it before,' said Mrs. Chadwick, with her most gracious smile. 'Let me introduce you to my husband--Sir Nugent Uffington.' 'Glad to know you, sir,' said Mr. Chadwick, putting out his hand--'glad to know any friend of Mr. Eardley's. Are you in this line?' pointing to the pictures on the walls. 'Not I, Mr. Chadwick,' said Uffington, with a laugh. 'I wish I were anything as useful. I have the misfortune to do nothing, to have been doing it all my life, and,' he added in rather a lower tone, 'to have made a singularly bad job of it.' And then dinner was announced, and the conversation stopped. Charley Ormerod was quite right when he spoke with such high praise of the quality of the dinners and the wines in Fairfax-gardens. Mr. Chadwick looked after these himself. He had a natural taste for good living, and though in his early days he had been quite content with a chump of coarse-grained meat broiled by himself over the furnace fire, and washed down by some cold weak tea out of a soda-water bottle, as soon as he could provide himself with better fare he took care to have it. 'A man is like an engine,' he used to say; 'his bearings get hot, and the whole thing goes crank and stiff, unless his works have been properly greased. Half my planning and thinking is done at night, after a good dinner and a bottle of fizz, when my Fan's in bed, and all these chattering servants are out of the way, and I sit up in the library and put down all I have got in my head. It's no good to attempt to plan anything up in the North, for there they have their heavy meal in the middle of the day, and after that I am good for nothing but to go to sleep, or to see what I have ordered is carried out; but here, after a _filly dy sole_ and a bottle of _Irroy_, I am as clear as a bell and as fresh as a two-year-old.'