a glow, a significance or a fun, abandoning them where examination is close and constant, and the critic’s trumpet-note dispersed to the thinness of the fee for his blowing.  As to foreign pictures, classic pictures, Victor had known his purse to leap for a Raphael with a history in stages of descent from the Master, and critics to swarm:  a Raphael of the dealers, exposed to be condemned by the critics, universally derided.  A real Raphael in your house is aristocracy to the roof-tree.  But the wealthy trader will reach to title before he may hope to get the real Raphael or a Titian.  Yet he is the one who would, it may be, after enjoyment of his prize, bequeath it to the nation—­presented to the nation by Victor Montgomery Radnor.  There stood the letters in gilt; and he had a thrill of his generosity; for few were the generous acts he could not perform; and if an object haunted the deed, it came of his trader’s habit of mind.

He revelled in benevolent projects of gifts to the nation, which would coat a sensitive name.  Say, an ornamental City Square, flowers, fountains, afternoon bands of music—­comfortable seats in it, and a shelter, and a ready supply of good cheap coffee or tea.  Tobacco? why not rolls of honest tobacco! nothing so much soothes the labourer.  A volume of plans for the benefit of London smoked out of each ascending pile in his brain.  London is at night a moaning outcast round the policeman’s’ legs.  What of an all-night-long, cosy, brightly lighted, odoriferous coffee-saloon for rich or poor, on the model of the hospitable Paduan?  Owner of a penny, no soul among us shall be rightly an outcast . . . .

Dreams of this kind are taken at times by wealthy people as a cordial at the bar of benevolent intentions.  But Victor was not the man to steal his refreshments in that known style.  He meant to make deeds of them, as far as he could, considering their immense extension; and except for the sensitive social name, he was of single-minded purpose.

Turning to the steps of a chemist’s shop to get a prescription made up for his Nataly’s doctoring of her domestics, he was arrested by a rap on his elbow; and no one was near; and there could not be a doubt of the blow—­a sharp hard stroke, sparing the funny-bone, but ringing.  His head, at the punctilio bump, throbbed responsively—­owing to which or indifference to the prescription, as of no instant requirement, he pursued his course, resembling mentally the wanderer along a misty beach, who hears cannon across the waters.

He certainly had felt it.  He remembered the shock:  he could not remember much of pain.  How about intimations?  His asking caused a smile.

Very soon the riddle answered itself.  He had come into view of the diminutive marble cavalier of the infantile cerebellum; recollecting a couplet from the pen of the disrespectful Satirist Peter, he thought of a fall:  his head and his elbow responded simultaneously to the thought.