It was on his first visit to Rainham, whom he had met abroad some years before, and with whom he had contracted an alliance that promised to be permanent, that Lightmark had decided his study should certainly be the river.  Rainham had a set of rooms in the house of his foreman, an eighteenth-century house, full of carved oak mantels and curious alcoves, a ramshackle structure within the dock-gates, with a quaint balcony staircase, like the approach to a Swiss chalet, leading down into the yard.  In London these apartments were his sole domicile; though, to his friends, none of whom lived nearer to him than Bloomsbury, this seemed a piece of conduct too flagrantly eccentric—­on a parity with his explanation of it, alleging necessity of living on the spot:  an explanation somewhat droll, in the face of his constant lengthy absence, during the whole of the winter, when he handed the reins of government to his manager, and took care of a diseased lung in a warmer climate.  To Lightmark, however, dining with his friend for the first time on chops burnt barbarously and an inferior pudding, residence even in a less salubrious quarter than Blackpool would have been amply justified, in view of the many charming effects—­for the most part coldly sad and white—­which the river offered, towards evening, from the window of his friend’s dining-room.

After his first visit, he availed himself eagerly of Rainham’s invitation to make his property the point of view from which he could most conveniently transfer to canvas his impressions; and he worked hard for months, with an industry that came upon his friend as a surprise, at the uneven outlines of the Thames warehouses, and the sharp-pointed masts that rose so trenchantly above them.  He had generated an habit of coming and going, as he pleased, without consideration of his host’s absences; and latterly, in the early spring—­whose caprices in England Rainham was never in a hurry to encounter—­the easel and painting tools of the assiduous artist had become an almost constant feature of the landscape.

Now, towards the close of an exceptionally brilliant day in the finish of May, he was putting the last touches to a picture which had occupied him for some months, and which he hoped to have completed for Rainham’s return.  As he stood on the wharf, which ran down to the river-side, leaning back against a crane of ancient pattern, and viewing his easel from a few yards’ distance critically, he could not contemplate the result without a certain complacency.

“It’s deuced good, after all,” he said to himself, with his head poised a little on one side.  “Yes, old Rainham will like this.  And, by Jove! what matters a good deal more, the hangers will like it, and if it’s sold—­and, confound it! it must be sold—­it will be a case of three figures.”