“Well, these models,” began Mr. Striker.  “You put them into an attitude, I suppose.”

“An attitude, exactly.”

“And then you sit down and look at them.”

“You must not sit too long.  You must go at your clay and try to build up something that looks like them.”

“Well, there you are with your model in an attitude on one side, yourself, in an attitude too, I suppose, on the other, and your pile of clay in the middle, building up, as you say.  So you pass the morning.  After that I hope you go out and take a walk, and rest from your exertions.”

“Unquestionably.  But to a sculptor who loves his work there is no time lost.  Everything he looks at teaches or suggests something.”

“That ’s a tempting doctrine to young men with a taste for sitting by the hour with the page unturned, watching the flies buzz, or the frost melt on the window-pane.  Our young friend, in this way, must have laid up stores of information which I never suspected!”

“Very likely,” said Rowland, with an unresentful smile, “he will prove some day the completer artist for some of those lazy reveries.”

This theory was apparently very grateful to Mrs. Hudson, who had never had the case put for her son with such ingenious hopefulness, and found herself disrelishing the singular situation of seeming to side against her own flesh and blood with a lawyer whose conversational tone betrayed the habit of cross-questioning.

“My son, then,” she ventured to ask, “my son has great—­what you would call great powers?”

“To my sense, very great powers.”

Poor Mrs. Hudson actually smiled, broadly, gleefully, and glanced at Miss Garland, as if to invite her to do likewise.  But the young girl’s face remained serious, like the eastern sky when the opposite sunset is too feeble to make it glow.  “Do you really know?” she asked, looking at Rowland.

“One cannot know in such a matter save after proof, and proof takes time.  But one can believe.”

“And you believe?”

“I believe.”

But even then Miss Garland vouchsafed no smile.  Her face became graver than ever.

“Well, well,” said Mrs. Hudson, “we must hope that it is all for the best.”

Mr. Striker eyed his old friend for a moment with a look of some displeasure; he saw that this was but a cunning feminine imitation of resignation, and that, through some untraceable process of transition, she was now taking more comfort in the opinions of this insinuating stranger than in his own tough dogmas.  He rose to his feet, without pulling down his waistcoat, but with a wrinkled grin at the inconsistency of women.  “Well, sir, Mr. Roderick’s powers are nothing to me,” he said, “nor no use he makes of them.  Good or bad, he ’s no son of mine.  But, in a friendly way, I ’m glad to hear so fine an account of him.  I ’m glad, madam, you ’re so satisfied with the prospect.  Affection, sir, you see, must have its guarantees!”