Rainham shrugged his shoulder.

“If you will have it, Dick—­only, don’t think that I am to be coaxed into compliments.”

“Is it bad?” asked Lightmark sceptically.

“On the contrary, it is surprisingly good.  It’s clever and pretty; sure to be hung, sure to sell.  Only you have come down a peg.  The sentiment about that river is very pretty, and that mist is eminently pictorial; but it’s not the river you would have painted last year; and that mist—­I have seen it in a good many pictures now—­is a mist that one can’t quite believe in.  It’s the art that pays, but it’s not the art you talked at Brodonowski’s last summer, that is all.”

Lightmark tugged at his moustache a little ruefully.  Rainham had an idea that his ups and downs were tremendous.  His mind was a mountainous country, and if he had elations, he had also depressions as acute.  Yet his elasticity was enormous, and he could throw off troublesome intruders, in the shape of memories or regrets, with the ease of a slow-worm casting its skin.  And so now his confidence was only shaken for a moment, and he was able to reply gaily to Rainham’s last thrust: 

“My dear fellow, I expect I talked a good deal of trash last year, after all”—­a statement which the other did not find it worth while to deny.

They had resumed their places at the table, and Lightmark, with a half-sheet of note-paper before him, was dashing off profiles.  They were all the same—­the head of a girl:  a childish face with a straight, small nose, and rough hair gathered up high above her head in a plain knot.  Rainham, leaning over, watched him with an amused smile.

“The current infatuation, Dick, or the last but one?”

“No,” he said; “only a girl I know.  Awfully pretty, isn’t she?”

Rainham, who was a little short-sighted, took up the paper carelessly.  He dropped it after a minute with a slight start.

“I think I know her,” he said.  “You have a knack of catching faces.  Is it Miss Sylvester?”

“Yes; it is Eve Sylvester,” said Lightmark.  “Do you know them?  I see a good deal of them now.”

“I have known them a good many years,” said Rainham.

“They have never spoken of you to me,” said Lightmark.

“No?  I dare say not.  Why should they?” He was silent for a moment, looking thoughtfully at his ring.  Then he said abruptly:  “I think I know now who your friend the barrister is, Dick.  I recognise the style.  It is Charles Sylvester, is it not?”

“You are a wizard,” answered the other, laughing.  “Yes, it is.”  Then he asked:  “Don’t you think she is awfully pretty?”

“Miss Sylvester?...  Very likely; she was a very pretty child.  You know, she had not come out last year.  Are you going?”

Lightmark had pulled out his watch absently, and he leapt up as he discovered the lateness of the hour.

“Heavens, yes!  I am dining out, and I shall barely have time to dress.  I will fetch my traps to-morrow; then we might dine together afterwards.”