“Oh, shut up, Copal!” said Lightmark good-humouredly.  “I was with ladies—­Dupuis will sympathize with me there, eh, mon vieux?—­and they wanted to stay at Lucerne until the last minute.  So we came straight through.”

“Then you haven’t seen Sarah in ‘Cleopatra,’ and we were relying on you for an unvarnished account.  Ladies, too!  See here, my boy, you won’t get any good out of touring about the Continent with ladies.  Hang it all!  I believe it’ll come true, after all?”

“Very likely—­what?”

“Oh, well, they said—­I didn’t believe it, but they said that you were going to desert the camp, and prance about with corpulent R.A.’s in Hanover Square.”

“And so would we all, if we got the chance,” said McAllister cynically.

And after the general outcry which followed this suggestion, the conversation drifted back to the old discussion of the autumn shows, the pastels at the Grosvenor, and the most recent additions to the National Gallery.

When at last Rainham came into the room, following, with his habitual half-timid air, the shambling figure of the painter Oswyn, it struck Lightmark that he had grown older, and that he had, as it were, assimilated some of the intimate disreputability of the place:  it would no longer have been possible to single him out as a foreign unit in the circle, or to detect in his mental attitude any of the curiosity of the casual seeker after new impressions, the Philistine in Bohemia.  There was nothing but pleasure in the slight manifestation of surprise which preceded his frank greeting of Lightmark, a greeting thoroughly English in its matter-of-fact want of demonstrativeness, and the avoidance of anything likely to attract the attention of others.

Oswyn seemed less at his ease; there was an extra dash of nervous brusqueness in the sarcastic welcome which he offered to the new-comer; and although there was a vacant seat in the little circle, of which Copal and Lightmark formed the nucleus, and to which Rainham had joined himself, he shuffled off to his favourite corner, and buried himself in “Gil Blas” and an abnormally thick cloud of tobacco-smoke.

Rainham gazed after him for a moment or two with a puzzled expression.

“Amiable as ever!” said Lightmark, with a laugh.  “Poor old beggar!  Have a cigarette?  You ought to give up pipes.  Haven’t you been told that cigarettes are—­what is it?—­’the perfect type——?’”

“Oh, chestnuts!” interposed Copal, “that’s at least six months old.  And it’s rot, too!  Do you know what McAllister calls them?  Spittle and tissue.  Brutal, but expressive.  But I say, old man, won’t Mrs. Thingumy drop on you for smoking in your dress-coat?  Or—­or——­ No, break it to me gently.  You don’t mean to say that you possess two?  I really feel proud of having my studio next door to you.”

“Copal is becoming quite an humorist,” Lightmark suggested in an impartial manner.  “What a wag it is!  Keep it up, my boy.  By the way, Mrs. Grumbit has been talking about your ‘goings on,’ as she calls them:  she’s apparently very much exercised in her mind as to the state of your morals.  She told me she had to take you in with the matutinal milk three times last week.  She wants me to talk to you like a father.  It won’t do, you know.”