‘The “Genius Loci,"’ said Fenwick, fumbling a little with the words.

It represented a young woman seated on the edge of a Westmoreland ghyll or ravine.  Behind her the white water of the beck flowed steeply down from shelf to shelf; beyond the beck rose far-receding walls of mountain, purple on purple, blue on blue.  Light, scantily nourished trees, sycamore or mountain-ash, climbed the green sides of the ghyll, and framed the woman’s form.  She sat on a stone, bending over a frail new-born lamb upon her lap, whereof the mother lay beside her.  Against her knee leaned a fair-haired child.  The pitiful concern in the woman’s lovely eyes was reflected in the soft wonder of the child’s.  Both, it seemed, were of the people.  The drawing was full of rustical suggestion, touched here and there by a harsh realism that did but heighten the general harmony.  The woman’s grave comeliness flowered naturally, as it were, out of the scene.  She was no model posing with a Westmoreland stream for background.  She seemed a part of the fells; their silences, their breezes, their pure waters, had passed into her face.

But it was the execution of the picture which perhaps specially arrested the attention of the men examining it.

‘Eclectic stuff!’ said Watson to himself, presently, as he turned away—­’seen with other men’s eyes!’

But on Lord Findon and on Cuningham the effect was of another kind.  The picture seemed to them also a combination of many things, or rather of attempts at many things—­Burne-Jones’ mystical colour—­the rustic character of a Bastien-Lepage or a Millet—­with the jewelled detail of a fourteenth-century Florentine, so wonderful were the harebells in the foreground, the lichened rocks, the dabbled fleece of the lamb:  but they realised that it was a combination that only a remarkable talent could have achieved.

‘By Jove!’ said Findon, turning on the artist with animation, ’where did you learn all this?’

‘I’ve been painting a good many years,’ said Fenwick, his cheeks aglow.  ‘But I’ve got on a lot this last six months.’

‘I suppose, in the country, you couldn’t get properly at the model?’

‘No.  I’ve had no chances.’

‘Let’s all pray to have none,’ said Cuningham, good-naturedly.  ’I had no notion you were such a swell.’

But his light-blue eyes as they rested on Fenwick were less friendly.  His Scotch prudence was alarmed.  Had he in truth introduced a genius unawares to his only profitable patron?

‘Who is the model, if I may ask?’ said Lord Findon, still examining the picture.

The reply came haltingly, after a pause.

‘Oh!—­some one I knew in Westmoreland.’

The speaker had turned red.  Naturally no one asked any further questions.  Cuningham noticed that the face was certainly from the same original as the face in the sketch-book, but he kept his observation to himself.