He stood amazed before his own virtues.  He drank little—­smoked little.  As for women—­he thought with laughter or wrath of Phoebe’s touch of jealousy!  There was an extremely pretty girl—­a fair-haired, conscious minx—­drawing in the same room with him at the British Museum.  Evidently she would have been glad to capture him; and he had loftily denied her.  If he had ever been as susceptible as Phoebe thought him, he was susceptible no more.  Life burned with sterner fire!

And yet, for all these self-denials, Morrison’s money and his own savings were nearly gone.  Funds might hold out till after Christmas.  What then?

He had heard once or twice from Morrison, asking for news of the pictures promised.  Lately he had left the letters unanswered; but he lived in terror of a visit.  For he had nothing to offer him—­neither money nor pictures.  His only picture so far—­as distinguished from exercises—­was the ‘Genius Loci.’  He had begun that in a moment of weariness with his student work, basing it on a number of studies of Phoebe’s head and face he had brought South with him.  He had been lucky enough to find a model very much resembling Phoebe in figure; and now, suddenly, the picture had become his passion, the centre of all his hopes.  It astonished himself; he saw his artistic advance in it writ large; of late he had been devoting himself entirely to it, wrapt, like the body of Hector, in a heavenly cloud that lifted him from the earth!  If the picture sold—­and it would surely sell—­then all paths were clear.  Morrison should be paid; and Phoebe have her rights.  Let it only be well hung at the Academy, and well sold to some discriminating buyer—­and John Fenwick henceforward would owe no man anything—­whether money or favour.

At this point he returned to his picture, grappling with it afresh in a feverish pleasure.  He caught up a mirror and looked at it reversed; he put in a bold accent or two; fumed over the lack of brilliancy in some colour he had bought the day before; and ended in a fresh burst of satisfaction.  By Jove, it was good!  Lord Findon had been evidently ‘bowled over’ by it—­Cuningham too.  As for that sour-faced fellow, Watson, what did it matter what he thought?

It must succeed!  Suddenly he found himself on his knees beside his picture, praying that he might finish it prosperously, that it might be given a good place in the Academy, and bring him fame and fortune.

Then he got up sheepishly, looking furtively round the room to be sure that the door was shut, and no one had seen him.  He was a good deal ashamed of himself, for he was not in truth of a religious mind, and he had, by now, few or no orthodox beliefs.  But in all matters connected with his pictures the Evangelical tradition of his youth still held him.  He was the descendant of generations of men and women who had prayed on all possible occasions—­that customers might be plentiful and business good—­that