And never, alack, in the case of any artist of talent, was there a worse ‘press’ than that which dealt with his pictures on the following morning.  The most venomous article of all was the work of a man whom Fenwick had treated with conceit and rudeness in the days of his success.  The victim now avenged himself, with the same glee which a literary club throws into the black-balling of some evil tongue—­some too harsh and too powerful critic of the moment.  ’Scamped and empty work,’ in which ‘ideas not worth stating’ find an expression ’not worth criticism.’  Mannerisms grown to absurdity; faults of early training writ dismally large; vulgarity of conception and carelessness of execution—­no stone that could hurt or sting was left unflung, and the note of meditative pity in which the article came to an end, marked the climax of a very neat revenge.  After reading it, Fenwick felt himself artistically dead and buried.

A great silence fell upon him.  He spoke to no one in the gallery, and he avoided his club.  Early in the afternoon he went to Lincoln’s Inn Fields—­only to hear from the lawyers that they had done all they could with the new scent, and it was no use pursuing it further.  He heard what they had to say in silence, and after leaving their office he visited a shop in the Strand.  Just as the light was waning, about seven o’clock on a May evening, he found himself again in his studio.  It was now absolutely bare, save for a few empty easels, a chair or two, and some tattered portfolios.  The two men representing the execution were in the dining-room.  He could hear the voices of a charwoman and of the lad who had helped him to arrange the gallery, talking in the kitchen.

Fenwick locked himself into the studio.  On his way thither he had recoiled, shivering, from the empty desolation of the house.  In the general disarray of the ticketed furniture and stripped walls, all artistic charm had disappeared.  And he said to himself, with a grim twist of the mouth, that if the house had grown ugly and commonplace, that only made it a better setting for the ugly and commonplace thing which he was about to do.

* * * * *

About half an hour later a boy, looking like the ‘buttons’ of a lodging-house, walked up to the side entrance of Fenwick’s ambitious mansion—­which possessed a kind of courtyard, and was built round two sides of an oblong.  The door was open and the charwoman just inside, so that the boy had no occasion to ring.  He carried a parcel carefully wrapped in an old shawl.

‘Is this Mr. Fenwick’s?’ asked the boy, consulting a dirty scrap of paper.

‘Aye,’ said the woman.  ’Well, who’s it from? isn’t there no note with it?’

The boy replied that there was no note, and his instructions were to leave it.

‘But what name am I to say?’ the woman called after him as he went down the path.

The boy shook his head.