Mary found something embarrassing in the humour of the old lady’s expression, and devoted herself to gazing out of the window at the mountain-bound landscape, in which houses, trees, and cattle all seemed to be in miniature, until the sound of regular breathing assured her that the inquisitive eyes were closed.

CHAPTER XII

During the long, hot August, which variously dispersed the rest of their acquaintances, the intimacy of that ill-assorted couple, the bird of passage Rainham, and Oswyn the artist, was able to ripen.  They met occasionally at Brodonowski’s, of which dingy restaurant they had now almost a monopoly; for its artistic session had been prorogued, and the “boys” were scattered, departing one by one, as their purses and inclinations prompted, to resume acquaintance with their favourite “bits” in Cornwall, or among the orchards and moors of Brittany, to study mountains in sad Merioneth, or to paint ocean rollers and Irish peasants in ultimate Galway.  On the occasion of their second meeting, Rainham having (a trifle diffidently, for the painter was not a questionable man) evinced a curiosity as to his summer movements, Oswyn had scornfully repudiated such a notion.

“Thank God!” he cried, “I have outworn that mania of searching for prettiness.  London is big enough for me.  My work is here, and the studies I want are here, and here I stay till the end of all things.  I hate the tame country faces, the aggressive stillness and the silent noise, the sentiment and the sheep of it.  Give me the streets and the yellow gas, the roar of the City, smoke, haggard faces, flaming omnibuses, parched London, and the river rolling oilily by the embankment like Styx at night when the lamps shine.”

He drew in a breath thirstily, as though the picture were growing on canvas before him.

“Well, if you want river subjects you must come and find them at Blackpool,” said Rainham; and Oswyn had replied abruptly that he would.

And he kept his word, not once but many times, dropping down on Rainham suddenly, unexplainedly, after his fashion, as it were from the clouds, in the late afternoon, when the clerks had left.  He would chat there for an hour or two in his spasmodic, half-sullen way, in which, however, an increasing cordiality mingled, making, before he retired once more into space, some colour notes of the yard or the river, or at times a rough sketch, which was never without its terse originality.

Rainham began to look forward to these visits with a recurring pleasure.  Oswyn’s beautiful genius and Oswyn’s savage humours fascinated him, and no less his pleasing, personal ambiguity.  He seemed to be a person without antecedents, as he was certainly without present ties.  Except that he painted, and so must have a place to paint in, he might have lodged precariously in a doss-house, or on door-steps, or under the Adelphi arches with