“My dear chap, I’ve just met Miss Arran, and she told me you were laid up with a bad cold, so I thought I’d pop in and cheer you up a little.”

He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act in his beneficent programme.

Mr. Mungold, freshly soaped and scented, with a neat glaze of gentility extending from his varnished boot-tips to his glossy hat, looked like the “flattered” portrait of a common man—­just such an idealized presentment as his own brush might have produced.  As a rule, however, he devoted himself to the portrayal of the other sex, painting ladies in syrup, as Arran said, with marsh-mallow children leaning against their knees.  He was as quick as a dressmaker at catching new ideas, and the style of his pictures changed as rapidly as that of the fashion-plates.  One year all his sitters were done on oval canvases, with gauzy draperies and a background of clouds; the next they were seated under an immemorial elm, caressing enormous dogs obviously constructed out of door-mats.  Whatever their occupation they always looked straight out of the canvas, giving the impression that their eyes were fixed on an invisible camera.  This gave rise to the rumour that Mungold “did” his portraits from photographs; it was even said that he had invented a way of transferring an enlarged photograph to the canvas, so that all that remained was to fill in the colours.  If he heard of this charge he took it calmly, but probably it had not reached the high spheres in which he moved, and in which he was esteemed for painting pearls better, and making unsuggestive children look lovelier, than any of his fellow-craftsmen.  Mr. Mungold, in fact, deemed it a part of his professional duty to study his sitters in their home-life; and as this life was chiefly led in the homes of others, he was too busy dining out and going to the opera to mingle much with his colleagues.  But as no one is wholly consistent, Mr. Mungold had lately belied his ambitions by falling in love with Kate Arran; and with that gentle persistency which made him so wonderful in managing obstreperous infantile sitters, he had contrived to establish a precarious footing in her brother’s studio.

Part of his success was due to the fact that he could not easily think himself the object of a rebuff.  If it seemed to hit him he regarded it as deflected from its aim, and brushed it aside with a discreet gesture.  A touch of comedy was lent to the situation by the fact that, till Kate Arran’s coming, Mungold had always served as her brother’s Awful Example.  It was a mark of Arran’s lack of humour that he persisted in regarding the little man as a conscious apostate, instead of perceiving that he painted as he could, in a world which really looked to him like a vast confectioner’s window.  Stanwell had never quite divined how Mungold had won over the sister, to whom her brother’s prejudices were a religion; but he suspected the painter of having united a deep belief in Caspar’s gifts with the occasional offer of opportune delicacies—­the port-wine or game which Kate had no other means of procuring for her patient.