disappointment.  It was a positive libel of course, . .  Swinburne has fine eyes and a still finer brow, but instead of idealizing the poet in him, the silly artist painted him as if he had no more intellectual distinction than a bill-sticker! ...  English art! ... pooh! ... don’t speak to me about it!  Go to Spain, Italy, Bavaria—­see what they can do, and then say a Miserere for the sins of the R A’s!”

Thus he would talk, and his criticisms carried weight with a tolerably large circle of influential and wealthy persons, who when they called upon him, and saw the perfection of his house and the rarity of his art collections, came at once to the conclusion that it would be wise, as well as advantageous to themselves, to consult him before purchasing pictures, books, statues, or china, so that he occupied the powerful position of being able with a word to start an artist’s reputation or depreciate it, as he chose,—­a distinction he had not desired, and which was often a source of trouble to him, because there were so few, so very few, whose work he felt he could conscientiously approve and encourage.  He was eminently good-natured and sympathetic; he would not give pain to others without being infinitely more pained himself; and yet, for all his amiability, there was a stubborn instinct in him which forbade him to promote, by word or look, the fatal nineteenth century spread of mediocrity.  Either a thing must be truly great and capable of being measured by the highest standards, or for him it had no value.  This rule he carried out in all branches of art,—­except his own ’cello-playing.  That was not great,—­that would never be great,—­but it was his pet pastime; he chose it in preference to the billiards, betting, and bar-lounging that make up the amusements of the majority of the hopeful manhood of London, and, as has already been said, he never inflicted it upon others.

He rubbed the rosin now thoughtfully up and down his bow, and glanced at the quaint old clock—­an importation from Nurnberg—­ that ticked solemnly in one corner near the deep bay-window, across which the heavy olive green plush curtains were drawn, to shut out the penetrating chill of the wind.  It wanted ten minutes to nine.  He had given orders to his man servant that he was on no account to be disturbed that evening, . . no matter what visitors called for him, none were to be admitted.  He had made up his mind to have a long and energetic practice, and he felt a secret satisfaction as he heard the steady patter of the rain outside, . . the very weather favored his desire for solitude,—­no one was likely to venture forth on such a night.

Still gravely rubbing his brow, his eyes travelled from the clock in the corner to a photograph on the mantel-shelf—­the photograph of a man’s face, dark, haughty, beautiful, yet repellent in its beauty, and with a certain hard sternness in its outline—­the face of Theos Alwyn.  From this portrait his glance wandered to the table, where, amid a picturesque litter of books and papers, lay a square, simply bound volume, with an ivory leaf-cutter thrust in it to mark the place where the reader left off, and its title plainly lettered in gold at the back—­“Nourhalma.”