A few weeks later, Rosamund returned to the topic.  “N.  F’s picture,” she wrote, “is evidently a great success—­and you can imagine how I feel about it.  I saw it, you remember, at an early stage, when he called it ‘The Slummer,’ and you remember too, the effect it had upon me.  Oh, Bertha, this is nothing less than a soul’s tragedy!  When I think what he used to be, what I hoped of him, what he hoped for himself!  Is it not dreadful that he should have fallen so low, and in so short a time!  A popular success!  Oh, the shame of it, the bitter shame!”

At this point, the reader’s smile threatened laughter.  But, feeling sure that her friend, if guilty of affectation, was quite unconscious of it, she composed her face to read gravely on.

“A soul’s tragedy, Bertha, and I the cause of it One can see now, but too well, what is before him.  All his hardships are over, and all his struggles.  He will become a popular painter—­one of those whose name is familiar to the crowd, like—­” instances were cited.  “I can say, with all earnestness, that I had rather have seen him starved to death.  Poor, poor N. F.!  Something whispers to me that perhaps I was always under an illusion about him. Could he so rapidly sink to this, if he were indeed the man I thought him?  Would he not rather have—­oh, have done anything?—­Yet this may be only a temptation of my lower self, a way of giving ease to my conscience.  Despair may account for his degradation.  And when I remember that a word, one word, from me, the right moment, would have checked him on the dangerous path!  When I saw ‘Sanctuary,’ why had I not the courage to tell him what I thought?  No, I became the accomplice of his suicide, and I, alone, am the cause of this wretched disaster.—­Before long he will be rich.  Can you imagine N. F. rich?  I shudder at the thought.”

The paper rustled in Bertha’s hand; her shoulders shook; she could no longer restrain the merry laugh.  When she sat down to answer Rosamund, a roguish smile played about her lips.

“I grieve with you”—­thus she began—­“over the shocking prospect of N. F.’s becoming rich.  Alas!  I fear the thing is past praying for; I can all but see the poor young man in a shiny silk hat and an overcoat trimmed with the most expensive fur.  His Academy picture is everywhere produced; a large photogravure will soon be published; all day long a crowd stands before it at Burlington House, and his name—­shall we ever again dare to speak it?—­is on the lips of casual people in train and ’bus and tram.  How shall I write on such a painful subject?  You see that my hand is unsteady.  Don’t blame yourself too much.  The man capable of becoming rich will become so, whatever the noble influences which endeavour to restrain him.  I suspect—­I feel all but convinced—­that N. F. could not help himself; the misfortune is that his fatal turn for moneymaking did not show itself earlier, and so warn you away.  I don’t know whether I dare send you a paragraph I have cut from yesterday’s Echo.  Yet I will—­it will serve to show you that—­as you used to write from Egypt—­all this is Kismet.”