In vain his Aunt Winnifred had tried to cheer him.  Ever since the morning when he had told her in his studio the lovely legend of Latmos he could not persuade himself that he had not unwittingly told his own story.  Aunt Winnifred showered the choicest tracts about his room.  She said with a sigh that she was sure he had experienced no change of heart; and Arthur replied, with a melancholy smile, “Not the slightest.”

The kind old lady was sorely puzzled.  It did not occur to her that her Arthur could be the victim of an unfortunate attachment, like the love-lorn heroes of whom she had read in the evil days when she read novels.  It did not occur to her, because she could as easily have supposed a rose-tree to resist June as any woman her splendid Arthur.

If some gossip to whom she sighed and shook her head, and wondered what could possibly ail Arthur—­who still ate his dinner heartily, and had as many orders for portraits as he cared to fulfill—­suggested that there was a woman in the case, good Aunt Winnifred smiled bland incredulity.

“Dear Mrs. Toxer, I should like to see that woman!”

Then she plied her knitting-needles nimbly, sighed, scratched her head with a needle, counted her stitches, and said,

“Sometimes I can’t but hope that it is concern of mind, without his knowing it.”

Mrs. Toxer also knitted, and scratched, and counted.

“No, ma’am; much more likely concern of heart with a full consciousness of it.  One, two, three—­bless my soul!  I’m always dropping a stitch.”

Aunt Winnifred, who never dropped stitches, smiled pleasantly, and answered,

“Yes, indeed, and this time you have dropped a very great one.”

Meanwhile Arthur’s great picture advanced rapidly.  Diana, who had looked only like a portrait of Hope Wayne looking out of a cloud, was now more fully completed.  She was still bending from the clouds indeed, but there was more and more human softness in the face every time he touched it.  And lo! he had found at last Endymion.  He lay upon a grassy knoll.  Long whispering tufts sighed around his head, which rested upon the very summit of the mountain.  There were no trees, no rocks.  There was nothing but the sleeping figure with the shepherd’s crook by his side upon the mountain top, all lying bare to the sky and to the eyes that looked from the cloud, and from which all the moonlight of the picture fell.

When Lawrence Newt came into the studio one morning, Arthur, who worked in secret upon his picture and never showed it, asked him if he would like to look at it.  The merchant said yes, and seated himself comfortably in a large chair, while the artist brought the canvas from an inner room and placed it before him.  As he did so, Arthur stepped a little aside, and watched him closely.

Lawrence Newt gazed for a long time and silently at the picture.  As he did so, his face rapidly donned its armor of inscrutability, and Arthur’s eyes attacked it in vain.  Diana was clearly Hope Wayne.  That he had seen from the beginning.  But Endymion was as clearly Lawrence Newt!  He looked steadily without turning his eyes, and after many minutes he said, quietly,