of art for the sake of art only might be erroneous, but it was at least exalted; and the instinct which drove him always for his material directly to life, rejecting nothing as common or unclean—­in the violence of his revolt, perhaps dwelling too uniformly on what was fundamentally ugly—­might be disputable, but was obviously sincere.  The last notion which Rainham took away with him, when they parted late in the evening (Oswyn having suddenly lapsed from the eloquence to the incoherency of drunkenness), was a wish to see more of him.  He had given him his card, and he waited until he had seen him place it—­after observing it for some moments attentively with lack-lustre eyes—­in the security of his waistcoat.  And as the two friends walked towards Charing Cross, Rainham observed that he hoped he would call.

“He is a disreputable fellow,” said Lightmark a little sullenly, “and an unprofitable acquaintance.  You will find it less difficult to persuade him to make you a visit than to finish it.”  At which Rainham had merely shrugged his shoulders, finding his friend, perhaps for the first time, a little banal.

CHAPTER V

A day or two later, as Rainham sat in his river-bound office struggling, by way of luncheon, with the most primitive of chops, his eyes, wandering away from a somewhat mechanic scrutiny of the Shipping Gazette, fell upon the shifting calendar on the mantelpiece.

The dial noted Thursday; and he reminded himself that on that day his friend, Lady Garnett, had a perennial habit of being at home to her intimates, on the list of whom Rainham could acknowledge, without undue vanity, his name occurred high.  There was a touch of self-reproach in his added reminder that a week had elapsed since his return, and he had not already hastened to clasp the excellent old lady’s hand.  It was an unprecedented postponement and an infringement of a time-honoured habit; and Rainham had for his habit all the respect of a man who is always indolent and often ill; though it must be admitted that to his clerks, who viewed the trait complacently, and to the importunate Bullen, who resented it, he seemed to be only regular in his irregularity.  He decided that at least this occasion should not be allowed to slip; a free afternoon would benefit him.  He was always rather lavish of those licenses; and it seemed to him that the tintinnabulation of teacups in Lady Garnett’s primrose and gray drawing-room would be a bearable change from the din of a hundred hammers, which had pelted him through the open windows all the morning.  They were patching a little wooden barque with copper, and he paused a moment in the yard, leaning on his slim umbrella to admire the brilliant yellow of the renewed sheets, standing out in vivid blots against the tarnished verdigris of the old.  To pass from Blackpool to the West, however, is a tardy process; and when Rainham reached the spruce, little