then he drew back from the canvas, and Malcolm and
Anna took his place.

It was one of those little studies from life that appeal so strongly to
the popular taste, and in spite of its simplicity and absence of
breadth, it was exquisitely painted. It was only a couple of
organ-grinders resting during the noontide heat. The man was sitting on
the curb with a short pipe in his mouth--a handsome rascal of a fellow,
evidently an Italian, with gold rings in his ears. The woman, in
peasant costume, looked heated and weary, and had a baby in her arms.
Both mother and child were painted from life.

"How beautiful!" whispered Anna, looking reverently at the giant beside
her.

"It is one of your best pictures, Goliath," observed Malcolm, "but I
suppose you do not intend to exhibit it next year?"

"Oh no," he returned, "it is already bespoken by a rich Australian.
Rainsford brought him here to see if he would give me an order, and he
fell in love with my organ-grinders at once. I had a sort of idea that
I would keep it myself, for the sake of Verity and the kid; but with a
family"--here Amias smoothed his yellow moustache proudly--"one is
bound to keep the pot boiling."

"I did not want it to go," sighed Verity, who had just then sidled up
to her husband--she looked a mere child beside him--"it is such a
perfect likeness of Babs." And then she withdrew with the rebel, while
the others made a turn round the studio; and Amias showed them
sketches, and also a more important picture that was to be exhibited at
the Royal Academy the following year. Verity was the model again--this
time as a sick gipsy girl lying on a heap of straw in a barn, while the
caravan and encampment were painted most realistically, even to the old
horse and shaggy donkey hobbled to the trunk of a tree, with a thin
yellow cur near them. When completed it would be a striking picture:
the smoky sunset tints of a November afternoon were faithfully
depicted; and a woodman's hut, just falling into decay, with golden
lichen on the rotting roof, was marvellously painted. Malcolm stood
before it in a rapt mood of ecstasy, then he struck himself
dramatically on the breast.

"Goliath," he said sorrowfully, "I am the most miserable of men, a
'mute inglorious Milton' is nothing to me. Nature has created me a
lover of the picturesque. In heart and soul I am an artist, I dabble in
colours, I dream of lights and shades and glorious effects; but the
power of working out