He packed them up, and then stood a trifle irresolutely, his hand feeling over the coins in his pocket.  Presently he produced two of them, a sovereign and a shilling.

“By the way, Bullen!” he said, “there is a little function common in your trade, the gift of a new hat.  It costs a guinea, I am told; though judging from the general appearance of longshoremen, the result seems a little inadequate.  Bullen, we are pretty old friends now, and I expect I shall not be down here so often just at present.  Allow me—­to give you a new hat.”

The foreman’s huge fist closed on the artist’s slender one.

“Thank you, sir!  You are such a facetious gentleman.  You may depend upon me.”

“I do,” said Lightmark, with a sudden lapse into seriousness, and frowning a little.

If something had cast a shadow over the artist for the moment he must have had a faculty of quick recovery, for there was certainly no shade of constraint upon his handsome face when a minute later he made his way up the balcony steps and into the office labelled “Private,” and, depositing his canvas upon the floor, treated his friend to a prolonged handshaking.

“My dear Dick!” said Rainham, “this is a pleasant surprise.  I had not the remotest notion you were here.”

“I thought you were at Bordighera, till Bullen told me of your arrival ten minutes ago,” said Lightmark, with a frank laugh.  “And how well——­”

Rainham held up his hand—­a very white, nervous hand with one ring of quaint pattern on the forefinger—­deprecatingly.

“My dear fellow, I know exactly what you are going to say.  Don’t be conventional—­don’t say it.  I have a fraudulent countenance if I do look well; and I don’t, and I am not.  I am as bad as I ever was.”

“Well, come now, Rainham, at any rate you are no worse.”

“Oh, I am no worse!” admitted the dry dock proprietor.  “But, then, I could not afford to be much worse.  However, my health is a subject which palls on me after a time.  Tell me about yourself.”

He looked up with a smile, in which an onlooker might have detected a spark of malice, as though Rainham were aware that his suggested topic was not without attraction to his friend.  He was a slight man of middle height, and of no apparent distinction, and his face with all its petulant lines of lassitude and ill-health—­the wear and tear of forty years having done with him the work of fifty—­struck one who saw Philip Rainham for the first time by nothing so much as by his ugliness.  And yet few persons who knew him would have hesitated to allow to his nervous, suffering visage a certain indefinable charm.  The large head set on a figure markedly ungraceful, on which the clothes seldom fitted, was shapely and refined, although the features were indefensible, even grotesque.  And his mouth, with its constrained thin lips and the acrid lines about it, was unmistakably a strong one.  His deep-set eyes, moreover, of a dark gray colour, gleamed from under his thick eyebrows with a pleasant directness; while his smile, which some people called cynical, as his habit of speech most certainly was, was found by others extraordinarily sympathetic.