“What are you doing just now?” said Father Payne after a pause.

“Oh, nothing worth mentioning,” said Gladwin softly.  “I work more slowly than ever, I believe.  It can hardly be called work, indeed.  In fact, I want to consult you about a few little bits—­they can hardly be called anything so definite as ’pieces’—­but I am in doubt about their arrangement.  The placing of independent pieces is such a difficulty to me, you know!  One must secure some sort of a progression!”

“Ah, I shall enjoy that,” said Father Payne.  “But you won’t take my advice, you know—­you never do!”

“Oh, don’t say that,” said Gladwin.  “Of course one must be ultimately responsible.  It can’t be otherwise.  But I always respect your judgment.  You always help me to the materials, at all events, for a decision!”

Father Payne laughed, and said, “Well, I shall be at your service any time!”

A little while after, Gladwin said he thought he would go to his room.  “I know your ways here,” he said to me with a smile; “one mustn’t interfere with a system.  Besides I like it!  It is such a luxury to obliterate oneself!” When we met again before dinner, Gladwin walked across to a big picture, an old sea-piece, rather effectively painted, which Father Payne had found in a garret, and had had restored and framed.

“What is this?” said Gladwin very gently; “I think this is new?”

Father Payne told him the story of its discovery, adding, “I don’t suppose it is worth much—­but it has a certain breeziness about it, I think.”

Gladwin considered it in silence, and then turned away.

“Do you like it?” said Father Payne—­a little maliciously, I thought.

“Like it?” said Gladwin meditatively, “I don’t know that I can go as far as that!  I like it in your house.”

Gladwin said very little at dinner.  He ate and drank sparingly; and I noticed that he looked at any dish that was offered him with a quick scrutinising glance.  He tasted his first glass of wine with the same air of suspense, and then appeared to be relieved from a preoccupation.  But he joined little in the talk, and exercised rather a sobering effect upon us.  Once or twice he spoke out.  Mention was made of Gissing’s Papers of Henry Ryecroft, and Father Payne asked him if he had read it.  “Oh no, I couldn’t read it, of course,” said Gladwin; “I looked into it, and had to put it away.  I felt as if I had opened a letter addressed to someone else by mistake!”

At a later period of the evening, a discussion arose about the laws of taste.  Father Payne had said that the one phenomenon in art he could not understand was the almost inevitable reaction which seemed to take place in the way in which the work of a great writer or painter or musician is regarded a few years after his vogue declines.  “I am not speaking,” said Father Payne, “of poor, commonplace, merely popular work, but of work which was acclaimed as great