At the next table Oswyn was holding forth, with eager gesticulations and the excitement of the hour in his eyes, on the subject of a picture which he contemplated painting in oils for exhibition at the Salon next year.  Rainham had heard it all before; still, he listened with a keen appreciation of the wonderful touch with which the little, dishevelled artist enlarged on the capabilities of his choice, the possibilities of colour and treatment.  The picture was to be painted at the dock, and the painter had already achieved a daringly suggestive impression in pastels of the familiar night-scene which he now described:  the streaming, vivid torches, their rays struggling and drowning in the murky water, glimmering faintly in the windows of the black warehouse barely suggested at the side; the alert, swarming sailors, busy with ropes and tackle; and in the middle the dark, steep leviathan, fresh from the sea-storms, growing, as it were, out of the impenetrable chaos of the foggy background, in which the river-lights gleamed like opals set in dull ebony.

When the tide of inspiration failed the speaker, as it soon did, Lightmark continued to look at him askance, with an air of absent consideration turning to uneasiness.  There was a general silence, broken only by the occasional striking of a match and the knocking of pipe against boot-heel.  Soon the young sculptor discovered that he had missed his last train, and fled incontinently.  Oswyn settled himself back in his chair, as one who has no regard for time, and rolled a cigarette, the animation with which he had spoken now only perceptible in the points of colour in either cheek.  Rainham and Lightmark left him a few minutes later, the last of the revellers, drawing the cat with the charred end of a match on the back of an envelope, and too deeply engrossed to notice their departure.

The fog had vanished, and the moon shone softly, through a white wreath of clouds, over the straggling line of house-tops.  The narrow, squalid, little street was deserted, and the sound of wheels in the busier thoroughfare at the end was very intermittent.

Lightmark buttoned his gloves deliberately, and drew a long breath of the night air before he broke the silence.

“It’s on occasions like this that I wish Bloomsbury and Kensington lay in the same direction—­from here, you know; we should save a fortune in cab-fares....  But—­but that wasn’t what I wanted to say.  Philip, my dear fellow, congratulate me.”

He paused for a minute looking at the other curiously, with something of a melodramatic pose.  Rainham had his face turned rather away, and was gazing at the pale reflection of the moonlight in one of the opposite windows.

“I know,” he said simply.  “I do congratulate you—­from the bottom of my heart.  And I hope you will make her happy.”  Then he turned and looked Lightmark in the face.  “I suppose you do love her, Dick?”