But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check.

“This is my own lair,” he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista.  It was square and brown and leathery:  no “effects”; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly—­above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a studio.

The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack’s break with his old life.

“Don’t you ever dabble with paint any more?” I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity.

“Never,” he said briefly.

“Or water-colour—­or etching?”

His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their handsome sunburn.

“Never think of it, my dear fellow—­any more than if I’d never touched a brush.”

And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything else.

I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece—­the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.

“Oh, by Jove!” I said.

It was a sketch of a donkey—­an old tired donkey, standing in the rain under a wall.

“By Jove—­a Stroud!” I cried.

He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little quickly.

“What a wonder!  Made with a dozen lines—­but on everlasting foundations.  You lucky chap, where did you get it?”

He answered slowly:  “Mrs. Stroud gave it to me.”

“Ah—­I didn’t know you even knew the Strouds.  He was such an inflexible hermit.”

“I didn’t—­till after. . . .  She sent for me to paint him when he was dead.”

“When he was dead?  You?”

I must have let a little too much amazement escape through my surprise, for he answered with a deprecating laugh:  “Yes—­she’s an awful simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud.  Her only idea was to have him done by a fashionable painter—­ah, poor Stroud!  She thought it the surest way of proclaiming his greatness—­of forcing it on a purblind public.  And at the moment I was the fashionable painter.”

“Ah, poor Stroud—­as you say.  Was that his history?”

“That was his history.  She believed in him, gloried in him—­or thought she did.  But she couldn’t bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with her.  She couldn’t bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could always get near enough to see his pictures.  Poor woman!  She’s just a fragment groping for other fragments.  Stroud is the only whole I ever knew.”

“You ever knew?  But you just said—­”

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

“Oh, I knew him, and he knew me—­only it happened after he was dead.”

I dropped my voice instinctively.  “When she sent for you?”

“Yes—­quite insensible to the irony.  She wanted him vindicated—­and by me!”