‘Well, I’ve done the trick!’ said Cuningham, coming out jauntily, his hands in his trousers pockets; then, with a jerk of the head towards the studio, and a lowered voice, ‘He’s writing the cheque.’

‘How much?’ said Watson, without turning his head.  Fenwick thought it decent to walk away, but he could not prevent himself from listening.  It seemed to him that he heard the words ‘Two hundred and fifty,’ but he could not be sure.  What a price!—­for such a thing.  His own blood ran warm and quick.

As he stood at the further end of the little terrace ruminating, Cuningham touched him on the shoulder.

‘I say, have you got anything to show upstairs?’

Fenwick turned to see in the sparkling eyes and confident bearing of the Scotchman, success writ large, expressing itself in an impulse of generosity.

‘Yes—­I’ve got a picture nearly finished.’

’Come and be introduced to Findon.  He’s a crank—­but a good sort—­lots of money—­thinks he knows everything about art—­they all do—­give him his head when he talks.’

Fenwick nodded, and followed Cuningham back to the studio, where Lord Findon was now examining Watson’s picture with no assistance whatever from the artist, who seemed to have been struck with dumbness.

Fenwick was introduced to a remarkably tall and handsome man, with the bearing of a sportsman or a soldier, who greeted him with a cordial shake of the hand, and a look of scrutiny so human and kindly that the very sharp curiosity which was in truth the foundation of it passed without offence.  Lord Findon was indeed curious about everything; interested in everything; and a dabbler in most artistic pursuits.  He liked the society of artists; and he was accustomed to spend some hundreds, or even thousands, a year out of his enormous income, in the purchase of modern pictures.  Possibly the sense of power over human lives which these acquisitions gave him pleased him even more than the acquisitions themselves.

He asked Fenwick a few easy questions, sitting rakishly on the edge of a tilted chair, his hat slipping back on his handsome, grizzled head.  Where did he come from—­with whom had he studied—­what were his plans?  Had he ever been abroad?  No.  Strange!  The artists nowadays neglected travel.  ’But you go!  Beg your way, paint your way—­but go!  Go before the wife and the babies come!  Matrimony is the deuce.  Don’t you agree with me, Philip?’ He laid a familiar hand on the artist’s arm.

‘Take care!’ said Cuningham, laughing.  ’You don’t know what I may have been up to this summer.’

Findon shrugged his shoulders.  ’I know a wise man when I see him.  But the fools there are about!  Well, I take a strong line’—­he waved his hand, with a kind of laughing pomposity, rolling his words—­’whenever I see a young fellow marrying before he has got his training—­before he has seen a foreign gallery—­before he can be sure of a year’s income ahead—­above all, before he knows anything at all about women, and the different ways in which they can play the devil with you!—­well, I give him up—­I don’t go to see his pictures—­I don’t bother about him any more.  The man’s an ass—­must be an ass!—­let him bray his bray!  Why, you remember Perry?—­Marindin?’