Academy, the Old Gentleman would take up your work and run you."

"At

"I don't think they'd take what I wanted to do." "Oh, but you mustn't want to do it," said Herbert. least, not till you can afford it. Besides, I'm not so sure that there isn't something in the Academy's ideas, after all. Candidly, I don't quite see how Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar could have been treated any better."

"I don't want to treat them at all," said Matt.

"Well, anyway, do something, you old duffer. You don't want to go grubbing along at ten bob a week-or was it tenpence a day? I forget. Promise me to do a picture for the next show, or I sha'n't feel easy in my mind about you."

"I promise," Matt murmured.

"That's right," said Herbert, considerably relieved. He went on heartily: "The Academy is the stepping-stone. It's no good kicking it out of the way. Put a picture in the Academy, by fair means if thou canst, but-put a picture in the Academy. You see, even Cornpepper had to come to us. And even if you will do new-fangled stuff, you can always get in if you make the picture a certain queer size-just to fit an awkward corner. I forget the exact measurements, but the Old Gentleman knows; he took care to find out in case I couldn't get in legitimately. I'll make a point of asking him. Poor old governor! I don't suppose he'll sleep to-night. Why, he was quite blubbery when the cab drove off. Do you know, there's a certain pathos about the Old Gentleman."

"He's been very good to you," said Matt.

"Well, and now he is happy. Virtue rewarded. The cream of the joke is that now I've got to go abroad in spite of himtravelling studentship, you see and he can't possibly chuck business for a year to come with me."

"Was the money in that envelope?" Matt asked.

"Only the first quarterly instalment. What a shame I can't pay you out of that! Only I must study abroad with the It wouldn't be honest to use it for any other purpose,

money.

would it?"

"Don't talk of it," said Matt, flushing from a sense of the misconstruction of his thoughtless query.

"Oh, don't be so shocked. You look as if I had already misappropriated it. I can't tell you how glad I was to see your dear old phiz to-night. What have you been doing with yourself! I often wondered why you didn't look me up at the club. By-the-way, here we are at the club."

"Here?" echoed Matt, interrogatively. They had been walking automatically as they conversed, and had come to a standstill before a blank, cheerless building in Golden Square.

"Yes, this is the shanty. Not my club, you duffer. This is only the students' little ken. I told my people the truth, you know. It would be snobbish not to drop in to-night. They make rather a night of it, though I hadn't intended to go otherwise. Hang it all, I had an appointment to sup with a girl at half-past ten! I forgot all about her-she'll be mad." He took out his watch. "Ten past eleven. Why, Ecclesiastical Art must have evolved till close on eleven! It isn't my fault, anyhow. Do you mind trotting round to the Imperial? She's in the first ballet. We'd better have a hansom."

The young men drove round to the stage door, but the fair one had departed after a few impatient instants. "I think I heard her tell the cabby 'Rule's,'" was the sixpennyworth of information obtained from the janitor.

"Let's go there," said Matt, who was now quite faint with hunger, and who had a lurking wish that Herbert would stand a supper-one of the olden heroic suppers that he had not tasted for half a year a wild riot of a supper, with real meat and wholesome vegetables and goodly sauces nay, even red wine, and a crowning cup of coffee made of real beans, not the charred crust of over- baked loaves, out of which he had been making his own lately; getting the burned bread cheaper with a double economy; a supper fit for well-fed gods, which a starving man having eaten might be well content to die. But Herbert, unaware of what was going on in Matt's inner man, replied, cruelly, "No, it's too late to look for her at the restaurant. I know her address, but she won't be there yet. Besides, I ought to show up at the club."

So they strolled back to the bleak building (Matt suddenly bethinking himself that even here supper might lie in wait), and passing through a dark hall, mounted a stone corkscrew staircase that led to a hubbub of voices and a piano jingling musichall tunes. The doorway of the first room was congested by black backs over-circled with clouds of smoke. Herbert and

Matt peered in unseen for a few moments. The little room, decorated only by a few sketches from the hands of members, and separated from the second room by the primitive partition of a screen, was crowded with young men in evening dress sitting round on chairs or knees or coal-scuttles, with glasses in their hands and cigars in their mouths, and new men were squeezing in from the inner room, the advent of each being greeted by facetious cheers. Plaudits more genuine in their ring welcomed Flinders, who, it was understood, had been in the final running. He came in, trying to make his naturally long face look short, and exclaiming with punctilious carelessness, "Where's my whiskey?" Rands, who, it was whispered, had lost by only a few votes, was not present; he had, apparently, gone home to the heart-broken gentility at Dalston. Matt caught sight of Cornpepper on the right of the doorway, and his heart rejoiced as at the sight of a laid supper. The little painter was clutching the middle of his chair with his most owl-like expression. His single eye-glass glittered in the gaslight.

"Why, there's Cornpepper!" Matt whispered, in awed ac

cents.

66

Oh, has he come in?" yawned Herbert. "I saw him marching Greme about among the Daniels, and giving them hell in emulation of Clinch-looking round after every swear, as if half hoping the ladies hadn't heard him, and half hoping they had." But Matt had only half heard Herbert. He was listening to the oracles of Cornpepper. But listeners rarely hear any good of themselves.

"Strang's not in it with you," Cornpepper was saying to Flinders. "There's no blooming style in his technique. It might have been done by an R.A."

"They do say the result would have been very different if

more R.A.'s had come down," said the semi-consoled Flinders, somewhat illogically. "But Barbauld had the gout, and Platt is in Morocco, and-"

At this point shouts of "Strang!" made the cousins start, but it was only the playfulness of the room greeting a new-comer as the victor. The youth acquiesced humorously in the make-believe, slouching round the room with a comical shuffle and a bow to each chair. Then a man got up and began a burlesque lecture on Ecclesiastical Art "to my young architectural friends." Every reference to apses, groins, or gargoyles was received with yells of delight, a demoniac shriek being reserved for Albrecht Dürer.

"I'm awfully glad I escaped it," said a youth in front of Matt. "I got there five minutes late, and the man wouldn't let me in. At least he said, 'I'm not supposed to let you in after nine-fifteen.' But I didn't take the tip-or give it."

In the middle of the address on Art, Gurney, coming up the staircase in the wake of a student friend (to whom he had been descanting on the absurdities of Cornpepperism, from which he had now revolted), perceived Herbert, and pushed him boisterously into the room, which straightway became a pandemonium; the pianist banging "See, the Conquering Hero Comes," the boys stamping, singing, huzzahing, rattling their glasses, and shouting, "Cigars !" "Drinks!" "Strang!"

Herbert beamingly ordered boxes of Havanas and "sodaand-whiskies," and soon Matt, still in his overcoat, found himself drinking and smoking and shouting with the rest, exalted by the whiskey into forgetfulness of his clothes and his fortunes, and partaking in all the rollicking humors of the evening, in all the devil-may-care gayety of the eternal undergraduate, roaring with his boon companions over the improper stories of the ascetic-looking young man with the poetic head, bawling street choruses, dancing madly in grotesque congested waltzes, wherein he had the felicity to secure Cornpepper for a partner, and distinguishing himself in the high-kicking pas seul, not departing till the final "Auld Lang Syne" had been sung with joined hands in a wildly whirling ring. Herbert had left some time before.

"Good-night, Matt; I want to get away. I don't often get such an excuse for being out late. There's no need for you to go yet, you lucky beggar," he whispered, confidentially, as he sallied forth, radiantly sober, weaving joyous dreams of his travelling studentship future.

When the party broke up in the small hours, Matt Strang, saturated with whiskey and empty of victual, staggered along the frosty pavements, singing to the stars, that reeled round, blinking and winking like the buttons on Herbert's boots.

CHAPTER IX

DEFEAT

His own boots preoccupied Matt's attention ere the New Year dawned. Had "Four-toes" continued going to Grainger's, instead of letting his subscription lapse perforce with the Christmas quarter, he might have convinced the class that his toes were normal, for they had begun to peep out despite all his efforts to botch up the seams. The state of his wardrobe prevented him from looking up Herbert at his club, especially as he was doubtful whether the travelling studentship had not already carried his cousin off; and thus that mad night, which was a hot shame to sober memory, grew to seem an unreal nightmare, and Herbert as distant as ever.

A vagrant atom of the scum of the city, he tasted all the bitterness of a million-peopled solitude. His quest for work was the more hopeless the shabbier his appearance grew. In optimistic after-dinner moods he had thought the spectacle of the streets sufficient, and to feast one's eyes on the pageant of life a cloyless ecstasy; and, indeed, in the first days of his wanderings, the merest artistic touch in the wintry streets. could still give him a pleasurable sensation that was a temporary anodyne-the yellow sand scattered on slippery days along the tram lines, and showing like a spilth of summer sunshine; the warm front of a public-house, making the only spot of color