sburn's past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a _jardiniere_
full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said: "If you stand
here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the mantel-piece, but
he wouldn't let it stay."

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's I had
ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place of
honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or _rose Dubarry_
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became
the picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light,
all the characteristic qualities came out--all the hesitations
disguised as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which, with
such consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real
business of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs.
Gisburn, presenting a neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were,
so inevitably the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an
unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture was
one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of veins,
a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the
circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at
every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because
she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and yet not to lose an atom
of the sweetness.

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable
pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself--"but the other
doesn't count, because he destroyed it."

"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a
footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.

As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat, the
thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead, his lean
sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a
self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same
quality as his pictures--the quality of looking cleverer than he was.

His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past her
to the portrait.

"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself. He
shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.

"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," h