Being a man of naturally retiring and modest disposition, Mr Watkins determined to make this visit incog., and after due consideration of the conditions of his enterprise, he selected the role of a landscape artist and the unassuming surname of Smith.  He preceded his assistant, who, it was decided, should join him only on the last afternoon of his stay at Hammerpond.  Now the village of Hammerpond is perhaps one of the prettiest little corners in Sussex; many thatched houses still survive, the flint-built church with its tall spire nestling under the down is one of the finest and least restored in the county, and the beech-woods and bracken jungles through which the road runs to the great house are singularly rich in what the vulgar artist and photographer call “bits.”  So that Mr Watkins, on his arrival with two virgin canvases, a brand-new easel, a paint-box, portmanteau, an ingenious little ladder made in sections (after the pattern of the late lamented master Charles Peace), crowbar, and wire coils, found himself welcomed with effusion and some curiosity by half-a-dozen other brethren of the brush.  It rendered the disguise he had chosen unexpectedly plausible, but it inflicted upon him a considerable amount of aesthetic conversation for which he was very imperfectly prepared.

“Have you exhibited very much?” said Young Person in the bar-parlour of the “Coach and Horses,” where Mr Watkins was skilfully accumulating local information on the night of his arrival.

“Very little,” said Mr Watkins, “just a snack here and there.”

“Academy?”

“In course. And the Crystal Palace.”

“Did they hang you well?” said Porson.

“Don’t rot,” said Mr Watkins; “I don’t like it.”

“I mean did they put you in a good place?”

“Whadyer mean?” said Mr Watkins suspiciously.  “One ’ud think you were trying to make out I’d been put away.”

Porson had been brought up by aunts, and was a gentlemanly young man even for an artist; he did not know what being “put away” meant, but he thought it best to explain that he intended nothing of the sort.  As the question of hanging seemed a sore point with Mr Watkins, he tried to divert the conversation a little.

“Do you do figure-work at all?”

“No, never had a head for figures,” said Mr Watkins, “my miss—­Mrs Smith, I mean, does all that.”

“She paints too!” said Porson.  “That’s rather jolly.”

“Very,” said Mr Watkins, though he really did not think so, and, feeling the conversation was drifting a little beyond his grasp, added, “I came down here to paint Hammerpond House by moonlight.”

“Really!” said Porson.  “That’s rather a novel idea.”

“Yes,” said Mr Watkins, “I thought it rather a good notion when it occurred to me.  I expect to begin to-morrow night.”

“What!  You don’t mean to paint in the open, by night?”

“I do, though.”