‘Ah, that’s where those French fellows have us,’ said Watson, languidly.  ’One of them said to me in Paris the other day, “It’s bad enough to paint the things you’ve seen—­it’s the devil to paint the things you’ve not seen."’

‘The usual fallacy,’ said Fenwick, firing up.  ’What do they mean by “seen"?’

He would have liked this time to go off at score.  But a sure instinct told him that he was beside a dying man; and he held himself back, trying instead to remember what small news and gossip he could, for the amusement of his friend.

Watson sat in a deep armchair, propped up by pillows.  The room in which they met had been a very distinguished room in the eighteenth century.  It had still some remains of carved panelling, a graceful mantelpiece of Italian design, and a painted ceiling half-effaced.  It was now part of a lodging-house, furnished with shabby cheapness; but the beauty, once infused, persisted; and it made no unworthy setting for a painter’s death.

The signs of desperate illness in Richard Watson were indeed plainly visible.  His shaggy hair and thick, unkempt beard brought into relief the waxen or purple tones of the skin.  The breath was laboured and the cough frequent.  But the eyes were still warm, living, and passionate, the eyes of a Celt, with the Celtic gifts, and those deficiencies, also, of his race, broadly and permanently expressed in the words of a great historian—­’The Celts have shaken all States, and founded none!’ No founder, no achiever, this—­no happy, harmonious soul—­but a man who had vibrated to life and Nature, in their subtler and sadder aspects, through whom the nobler thoughts and ambitions had passed, like sound through strings, wringing out some fine, tragic notes, some memorable tones.  ‘I can’t last more than a week or two,’ he said, presently, in a pause of Fenwick’s talk, to which he had hardly listened—­’and a good job too.  But I don’t find myself at all rebellious.  I’m curiously content to go.  I’ve had a good time.’

This from a man who had passed from one disappointed hope to another, brought the tears to Fenwick’s eyes.

‘Some of us may wish we were going with you,’ he said, in a low voice, laying his hand a moment on his friend’s knee.

Watson made no immediate reply.  He coughed—­fidgeted—­and at last said: 

‘How’s the money?’

Fenwick hastily drew himself up.  ‘All right.’

He reached out a hand to the tongs and put the fire together.

‘Is that so?’ said Watson.  The slight incredulity in his voice touched some raw nerve in Fenwick.

‘I don’t want anything,’ he said, almost angrily.  ’I shall get through.’

Cuningham had been talking, no doubt.  His affairs had been discussed.  His morbid pride took offence at once.

‘Mine’ll just hold out,’ said Watson, presently, with a humorous inflexion—­’it’ll bury me, I think—­with a few shillings over.  But I couldn’t have afforded another year.’