‘We are not in any hurry, I assure you.’

The young man stood looking at the artist, in an attitude of cool indifference; but at the same time his hand secured the note, and placed it safely in the drawer of the table between them.

He wrote a receipt, and handed it to Fenwick.

‘Good-day,’ said Fenwick, turning to go.

The other followed him, and as they stepped out into the exhibition-rooms of the shop, hung in dark purple, Fenwick perceived in the distance what looked like a fine Corot, and a Daubigny—­and paused.

‘Got some good things, since I was here last?’

‘Oh, we’re always getting good things,’ said his companion, carelessly, without the smallest motion towards the pictures.

Fenwick nodded haughtily, and walked towards the door.  But his soul smarted within him.  Two years before, the owners of any picture-shop in London would have received him with empressement, have shown him all they had to show, and taken flattering note of his opinion.

On the threshold he ran against the Academician with the orange hair and beard, who had been his fellow-guest at the Findon’s on the night of his first dinner-party there.  The orange hair was now nearly white; its owner had grown to rotundity; but the sharp, glancing eyes and pompous manner were the same as of old.  Mr. Sherratt nodded curtly to Fenwick, and was then received with bows and effusion by the junior partner standing behind.

’Ah, Mr. Sherratt!—­delighted to see you!  Come to look at the Corot?  By all means!  This way, please.’

Fenwick pursued his course to Oxford Street in a morbid self-consciousness.  It seemed to him that all the world knew him by now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he was stared and pointed at.

He took refuge from this nightmare in an Oxford Street restaurant, and as he ate his midday chop he asked himself, for the hundredth time, how the deuce it was that he had got into the debts which weighed him down.  He had been extravagant on the building and furnishing of his house—­but after all he had earned large sums of money.  He sat gloomily over his meal—­frowning—­and trying to remember.  And once, amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight—­’And then, you know, I could look after money!  You’re dreadfully bad about money, John!’

The echo of that voice in his ears made him restless.  He rose and set forth again—­toward Fitzroy Square.

On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting for him at the lawyer’s.  It came from Phoebe’s cousin, Freddy Tolson.  Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew—­to a mining town in New South Wales.  He had been asked to come to England and testify—­no matter at what expense.  In the letter just received—­bearing witness in its improved writing and spelling to the