“My dear, since I’ve chucked painting people don’t say that stuff about me—­they say it about Victor Grindle,” was his only protest, as he rose from the table and strolled out onto the sunlit terrace.

I glanced after him, struck by his last word.  Victor Grindle was, in fact, becoming the man of the moment—­as Jack himself, one might put it, had been the man of the hour.  The younger artist was said to have formed himself at my friend’s feet, and I wondered if a tinge of jealousy underlay the latter’s mysterious abdication.  But no—­for it was not till after that event that the rose Dubarry drawing-rooms had begun to display their “Grindles.”

I turned to Mrs. Gisburn, who had lingered to give a lump of sugar to her spaniel in the dining-room.

“Why has he chucked painting?” I asked abruptly.

She raised her eyebrows with a hint of good-humoured surprise.

“Oh, he doesn’t have to now, you know; and I want him to enjoy himself,” she said quite simply.

I looked about the spacious white-panelled room, with its famille-verte vases repeating the tones of the pale damask curtains, and its eighteenth-century pastels in delicate faded frames.

“Has he chucked his pictures too?  I haven’t seen a single one in the house.”

A slight shade of constraint crossed Mrs. Gisburn’s open countenance.  “It’s his ridiculous modesty, you know.  He says they’re not fit to have about; he’s sent them all away except one—­my portrait—­and that I have to keep upstairs.”

His ridiculous modesty—­Jack’s modesty about his pictures?  My curiosity was growing like the bean-stalk.  I said persuasively to my hostess:  “I must really see your portrait, you know.”

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband, lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian deerhound’s head between his knees.

“Well, come while he’s not looking,” she said, with a laugh that tried to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble Emperors of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs poised among flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in the inevitable garlanded frame.  The mere outline of the frame called up all Gisburn’s past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a jardiniere full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said:  “If you stand here you can just manage to see it.  I had it over the mantel-piece, but he wouldn’t let it stay.”