elieve we dine out. Come back and have some tea;
Eve will be enchanted. I really decline to sit in that puddle."

Rainham rose slowly.

"Perhaps I will," he said. "I would have called before, if I had
thought there was the least chance of finding you. And how do things
go?"

As they strolled along through the deserted Park, and Lightmark
entertained his friend with an extravagant narration of their
miseries on the _Lucifer_, the chronic sea-sickness of the ladies, the
incapacity and intoxication of the steward, and the discontent of
everybody on board--he spoke as if they had entertained a
considerable party--Rainham's interested eyes had leisure to note a
change in him, not altogether unexpected. He presented the same
handsome, well-dressed, prosperous figure; and yet prosperity had
in some degree coarsened him. The old charm of his boyish
carelessness had been succeeded by a certain hard assurance, an air
of mundane, if not almost commercial shrewdness, which gave him less
the note of an artist than of a successful man of business. And
where the old Lightmark, the Lightmark of the Cafe Grecco days,
broke out at times, it was less pleasantly than of old, in a curious
recklessness, a tendency, which jarred on Rainham's susceptible
nerves, to dilate with a vanity which would have been vulgar, had it
not been almost childish, on his lavish living, the magnitude of his
expenditure.

"You must find that sort of thing rather a tax?" he asked
tentatively, after a description which struck him as unnecessarily
exuberant of a hospitality in the summer.

"Oh, it pays in the long run," remarked the other easily, "to keep
open house and go everywhere. Thank Heaven, the uncle is liberal! I
admit we have been going at rather a pace lately. But, then, I can
knock off a couple of pictures as soon as I have a little time,
which will raise the wind again. I know what the public wants, bless
it!"

Rainham shrugged his shoulders rather wearily.

"Poor public! If it wants art made in that spirit, it is worse than
I believed."

Lightmark looked askance at him, frowning a little, pulling at his
long moustache. He was absorbed for some time--they had turned into
the Edgware Road, and the soft rain had begun again--in ineffectual
pursuit of cabs. When at last he had caught a driver's eye, and they
had settled themselves on the cushions of a hansom, he turned
abruptly to his companion to ask him if he had seen the Academy
before it