“I suppose I do.  But how the deuce did you know anything about it?  I have been blaming myself, needlessly it appears, for not letting you hear of it.  Has it—­has it been in the papers?”

Rainham laughed in spite of himself.

“Approaching marriage of a celebrated artist?  No, Dick, I don’t think it has.  Lady Garnett told me more than a week ago.”

“Oh,” said Dick blankly.  “I—­I’m much obliged to her.  I thought perhaps it was the Colonel; I wrote to him, you know, and I thought he was a discreet old bird.  But how did Lady Garnett know?”

“She seemed to think it was no secret,” said Rainham, with a suggestion of apology in his tone; “and, of course, she knows that I am——­”

“My best friend,” interposed the other impulsively.  “So you are.  And I ought to have told you; I was a brute.  And I feel like the devil about it....  Well, it can’t be helped.  Will you have this cab, or shall I?”

Rainham drew back with a gesture of abnegation, as the driver reined the horse back upon its haunches with a clatter.

“I’m going to walk, I think.  Only up to Bloomsbury, you know.  Good-night, Dick.  I hope you’ll be very happy, both of you.”

When the cab drove off, Rainham stood still for a minute and watched it out of sight.  Then he started and seemed to pull himself together.

“I wish I knew!” he said aloud to himself, as he stepped rapidly towards the East.  “Well, we’ll be off to Bordighera now, mon vieux.  We’ve lost Dick, I think, and we’ve lost——­”

The soliloquy died away in a sigh and a pathetic shrug.

CHAPTER XV

A day or two later, when Rainham called in the afternoon at the Kensington studio to announce his approaching flight from England, he found Mrs. Sylvester and Eve in occupation, and a sitting in progress.  His greeting of Eve was somewhat constrained.  He seemed to stumble over the congratulations, the utterance of which usage and old acquaintance demanded; and he was more at his ease when the ice was fairly broken.

“I expected to find you here,” he said, addressing Mrs. Sylvester.  “I have been to your house, and they told me you would probably be at the studio—­the studio—­so I came on.”

“Good boy, good boy!” said Lightmark, with as much approbation in his voice as the presence of the stick of a paint-brush between his teeth would allow.  “You’ll excuse our going on a little longer, won’t you?  It’ll be too dark in a few minutes.”

“You don’t look well, Philip,” remarked Mrs. Sylvester presently, with a well-assumed air of solicitude.  “You ought to have come to Lucerne with us, instead of spending all the summer in town.”

“Yes; why didn’t you, Philip?” cried Eve reproachfully.  “It would have been so nice—­oh, I’m so sorry, Dick, I didn’t mean to move—­you really ought to have come.”