ory by the catalogue of the aforesaid sale. "I'm afraid he's

gone under, poor fellow," he said.

"I've tried to come across

him, but he was always a mysterious person."

But Cornpepper continued to talk of the sale, of the fluctuations of prices; of the impoverished condition of the market, so menacing to young artists who had set up fashionable establishments on the strength of their first sales; of the potentialities of America, that yet undiscovered continent, till all the tide of secret bitterness welled up in a flood from the depths of Matthew Strang's soul. Money! Money! Money! He had never really escaped from it. What a mirage Art was! Even success only brought the same preoccupations with prices, it was all the old sordidness over again on a higher plane. The ring of the gold was the eternal undertone, bringing discord into every harmony. With a public ignorant of what Art meant, conceiving it as something rigid like science, not as the expression of the temperament, technique, and vision of individual genius; with a public craving for pictorial platitudes; Art could not be, and was not, produced, save by a martyr here and there. Everywhere the counting of pieces and the shuffling of bank-notes! The complacent Academician irritated him; he was tired of reading of his marble halls, the vassals and serfs at his side, his garden parties, his Belgravian palace erected on the ruins of a forgotten bankruptcy. The fumes of expensive wines and cigars gave him a momentary vertigo.

"For God's sake, stop talking shop!" he burst out suddenly. The astonished Cornpepper let his eye-glass fall.

"Have you gone crazy, Strang?" he asked, witheringly. "What do you join an artists' club for, if you don't want to talk shop? Strikes me you'd better get yourself put up for the Commercial Travellers' Union."

"That's what we are," retorted Matthew Strang.

The Scotch landscape-painter pacified them by proposing a game of "shell-out," and Herbert eagerly seconding the proposal it was carried nem. con., and the group mounted to the billiard-room, where Matthew Strang won half a crown before he went off to his nocturnal parties, leaving his cousin still renewing with zest his olden experience of the lighter side of British Art.

CHAPTER III

"VAIN - LONGING"

As a matter of habit Mr. Matthew Strang went, some weeks later, to the Academy Soirée to add his handshake to the many suffered by the presidential image of patience at the top of the stairs, and to help appease the insatiable appetite of the crowd of Christians to whom lions are thrown. It was part of his success to move through fluttering drawing-rooms, and it imbittered him to feel that the average admirer conceives the artist as living in a world of beautiful dreams, sweet with the incense of perpetually swung censers, and knows nothing of the artist's agonies, or the craftsman's sweatings, that go to the making of beautiful things; sees always the completed design, and never the workman scraping the paint or wetting the back of the canvas or tossing sleeplessly under the weight of a ruined picture.

To-night, in the restless dissatisfaction that had grown upon him since the reappearance of Herbert had undammed a flood of ancient memories, this feeling possessed him more strongly than ever, inspiring a morbid resentment of the chattering crew divided between hero-worship and champagne-cup. There was almost a suspicion of a leonine snarl in the stereotyped answer, "You are very kind to say so," which he gave to the grimacing persons who buttonholed him to bask in the radiance of his success or to effuse honest admiration. Everybody seemed to him ill-dressed, ill-mannered, and in ill-health. He thought he had never seen so many cadaverous complexions, snag teeth, powder-tipped noses, scraggy shoulders, glazed eyes (with pincenez, monocle, or spectacles), ungainly figures (squat or slim), queer costumes, bald heads, or top-heavy hair-dressings; how

horrible gentlefolk were, more uncouth even than the denizens of the slums! Those one could imagine to be a very different breed, cleaned and properly clothed, but these had had every chance. How poorly humanity compared with cows and horses; what a price man had paid for soul-and without always getting it. Surely, none but custom-blinded eyes could gaze unblinking, unsmiling, at the grotesque show of mankind, the quaint crania, the unsightly bodies; the crowd struck him as the inventions of a comic draughtsman in a malicious mood, the men in black and white, the ladies in color. And, indeed, though he was not thinking of himself, his stalwart, well-proportioned figure and his handsome head stood out notably from a serried batch of degenerate physiques.

"So you are determined to cut me, Mr. Strang?"

The painter started violently as the laughing syllables, sounding far more musical than the faint far-away strains of the band in the Sculpture Room, vibrated above the endless buzz of the crowd that hemmed him in.

He looked up. His moody fit vanished before the radiant apparition of a beautiful woman in a shimmering amber gown from which her shoulders rose dazzling. A jewelled butterfly fluttered at her breast. In the twinkling of an eye-and that eye hers-he recanted his contempt for the Creator's draughtsmanship.

"I have bowed to you three times," she said, and the twinkling of her eye-large and gray and lambent was supplemented by the smile that hovered about the corners of her wide sweet mouth. "But you won't take any notice of me."

"I beg your pardon," he said, in flushed embarrassment, "I must have been lost in thought."

She shook her head bewitchingly.

"You don't remember me. Celebrities never do remember people, though people always remember celebrities."

"I do remember you," he protested, chords of memory vibrating tremulously and melodiously. "I had the pleasure of meeting you at a garden-party some years ago."

"But you don't remember my name?"

"I don't think I caught it then," he said, simply. "But I

remember you scolded me because my pictures were only beautiful."

She laughed gayly.

"Ah, then I ought to apologize to you. I have changed my mind."

"Now you don't think they're even that!"

"Far from it! What I mean is that I have come to think less of useful things. You know I was a Socialist then. But let me introduce my friend to you."

"You have to introduce yourself first, Nor," said a younger lady whom he then perceived at her side.

He smiled.

"You are irrepressible, Olive," said her friend. "Mr. Strang, let me introduce myself then-Mrs. Wyndwood."

He bowed, still smiling.

"Eleanor Wyndwood," she added, "to explain my friend's abbreviation, which always puzzles strangers."

"Everybody knows Nor stands for Eleanor," remonstrated her friend. "Do they suppose your name is Norval?"

Mrs. Wyndwood's smile met the painter's.

"And now, if my punctilious friend is satisfied, let me introduce Miss Regan."

Miss Regan gave him her hand cordially.

"Where are your pictures to be found, Mr. Strang?" she asked. "We haven't been to the Academy before, and we should so like to save the shilling."

"Oh, they're not worth looking at," he said, uncomfortably. He suddenly felt ashamed of them. It was thus that he had felt more than two years ago, when, over her strawberries and cream, Mrs. Wyndwood had lectured him for artistic aloofness from the travail of the time, insisting that it was the mission of all forms of Art to express the aspiration of the century towards a higher and juster social life, towards the coming of God's kingdom on earth, and that it would be honester for him to plough the land than to paint decorative pictures for the diningrooms of capitalists. He had scarcely taken in her point of view, more persuaded by her presence than by her words, by some intangible radiation of earnestness and goodness from the

lovely face and the soulful gray eyes, and less ashamed of the sinfulness of his own artistic standpoint than of the often meretricious quality of his performance. She had been the first woman to speak slightingly of his rôle in the world, and her dispraise, co-operating, as it did, with his own discontent, had impressed him more than all the praise, just as one unfavorable newspaper critique rankled, while a hundred eulogies passed across consciousness, scarcely ruffling its waves.

When the flux of the garden-party had drifted her off in the wake of Gerard Brode, the handsome young Socialist, he had feit that he, too, might have become a Socialist or a ploughboy, or even an honest painter, under the inspiration of her enthusiastic eyes. He had thought of her for several months, almost as a creature of dream, so swift and shadowy had been her flitting across his horizon, and she had easily lent herself to that conception of Ideal Womanhood which the world had not yet destroyed, because the world had not created it. It was under the impulsion of the eloquent play of light across her face that he had conceived and painted that allegory of woman's inspiration which Herbert, unable to read in it the pathetic expression of the painter's dissatisfaction at once with real womanhood and his own work, had found so amusing, and he was startled now to see how nearly he had reproduced her traits in his conception of the figure on the mountain-top; not so much, perhaps, in the features, in which the slight upward tilt of the nose was omitted and the size of the ears diminished, as in the clustering chestnut hair, with gold lights in it, and in the poise of the head, the long, thin Botticelli hands, the small feet, and the graceful curves of the rather tall form, and, above all, in the expression that seemed to suffuse her face with spiritual effluence. The first impression renewed itself in all its depth; he asked himself with amazement how he could have let the waves of life wash it away so completely that even Herbert's inquiry about the picture had not recalled her clearly to his memory. "Oh, but I want to see your pictures," she said. Triumph of Bacchus,' I hear. I saw the fresco-by Caracci, wasn't it?-in the Farnese Palace, in Rome, on our homeward journey. We've been in Russia, Miss Regan and I, with Mon

"There's a