As they strolled along through the deserted Park, and Lightmark entertained his friend with an extravagant narration of their miseries on the Lucifer, the chronic sea-sickness of the ladies, the incapacity and intoxication of the steward, and the discontent of everybody on board—­he spoke as if they had entertained a considerable party—­Rainham’s interested eyes had leisure to note a change in him, not altogether unexpected.  He presented the same handsome, well-dressed, prosperous figure; and yet prosperity had in some degree coarsened him.  The old charm of his boyish carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard assurance, an air of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less the note of an artist than of a successful man of business.  And where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Cafe Grecco days, broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham’s susceptible nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his expenditure.

“You must find that sort of thing rather a tax?” he asked tentatively, after a description which struck him as unnecessarily exuberant of a hospitality in the summer.

“Oh, it pays in the long run,” remarked the other easily, “to keep open house and go everywhere.  Thank Heaven, the uncle is liberal!  I admit we have been going at rather a pace lately.  But, then, I can knock off a couple of pictures as soon as I have a little time, which will raise the wind again.  I know what the public wants, bless it!”

Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.

“Poor public!  If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than I believed.”

Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his long moustache.  He was absorbed for some time—­they had turned into the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again—­in ineffectual pursuit of cabs.  When at last he had caught a driver’s eye, and they had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy before it closed.

“You recognised your domain?” he asked lightly, when the other had responded in the affirmative—­“in my picture, I mean?”

He spoke quickly, in his accustomed blithe habit; it might have been merely a morbid fancy of Rainham’s which traced a note of anxiety, of concealed uneasiness, in his accent, that the bare question scarcely justified.