She bustled up and, throwing off the Japanese finery, left the room, while Cyril removed the drawing from the easel and hid it away.

‘Isn’t she delightful?’ ejaculated Cyril.

’Delightful!  What, that old wretch?  All that interests me in her is the change in her voice after she says she will die laughing.’

‘Oh,’ said Cyril, ’she seems to be troubled with a drunken son in the country somewhere, who is always getting into scrapes.  Wilderspin’s in love with her daughter, a wonderfully beautiful girl, the finding of whom at the very moment when he was in despair for the want of the right model gave the final turn to his head.  He thinks she was sent to him from Paradise by his mother’s spirit!  He does, I assure you.’

‘Wilderspin in love with a model!’

‘Oh, not a la Raphael.’

’If you think Wilderspin to be in love with any woman, you little know what love is,’ I exclaimed.  ’He is in love with his art and with that beautiful memory of his mother’s self-sacrifice which has shattered his reason, but built up his genius.  Except as a means towards the production of those pictures that possess him, no model is anything more to him than his palette-knife.  Shall you be alone this evening?’

‘This evening I dine at Sleaford’s.  To-morrow I am due in Paris.’

Wilderspin, who had now entered the studio, seemed genuinely pleased to see me again, and told me that in a few days he should be able to borrow ‘Faith and Love’ of its owner for the purpose of beginning a replica of it, and hoped then to have the pleasure of showing it to me.

‘I observed Mrs. Gudgeon in the hall,’ said he to Cyril.  ’To think that so unlovely a woman should, through an illusion of the senses, seem to be the mere material mother of her who was sent to me from the spirit-world in the very depths of my despair!  Wonderful are the ways of the spirit-world.  Ah, Mr. Aylwin, did it never occur to you how important is the expression of the model from whom you work?’

‘I am not a painter,’ I said, ‘only an amateur,’ trying to stop a conversation that might run on for an hour.

’It has never occurred to you!  That is strange.  Let me read to you a passage upon this subject just published in The Art Review, written by the great painter D’Arcy.’

He then took from Cyril’s table a number of The Art Review, and began to read aloud:—­

It is a curious thing that not only the general public, but the art connoisseurs and the writers upon art, although they know full well how a painter goes to work in painting a picture, speak and write as though they thought that the head of a beautiful woman was drawn from the painter’s inner consciousness, instead of from the real woman who sits to him as a model.  Notwithstanding all the technical excellence of Raphael, his extraordinary good luck in finding the model that suited his genius