et a little too much amazement escape through my surprise,
for he answered with a deprecating laugh: "Yes--she's an awful
simpleton, you know, Mrs. Stroud. Her only idea was to have him done by
a fashionable painter--ah, poor Stroud! She thought it the surest way
of proclaiming his greatness--of forcing it on a purblind public. And
at the moment I was _the_ fashionable painter."

"Ah, poor Stroud--as you say. Was _that_ his history?"

"That was his history. She believed in him, gloried in him--or thought
she did. But she couldn't bear not to have all the drawing-rooms with
her. She couldn't bear the fact that, on varnishing days, one could
always get near enough to see his pictures. Poor woman! She's just a
fragment groping for other fragments. Stroud is the only whole I ever
knew."

"You ever knew? But you just said--"

Gisburn had a curious smile in his eyes.

"Oh, I knew him, and he knew me--only it happened after he was dead."

I dropped my voice instinctively. "When she sent for you?"

"Yes--quite insensible to the irony. She wanted him vindicated--and by
me!"

He laughed again, and threw back his head to look up at the sketch of
the donkey. "There were days when I couldn't look at that
thing--couldn't face it. But I forced myself to put it here; and now
it's cured me--cured me. That's the reason why I don't dabble any more,
my dear Rickham; or rather Stroud himself is the reason."

For the first time my idle curiosity about my companion turned into a
serious desire to understand him better.

"I wish you'd tell me how it happened," I said.

He stood looking up at the sketch, and twirling between his fingers a
cigarette he had forgotten to light. Suddenly he turned toward me.

"I'd rather like to tell you--because I've always suspected you of
loathing my work."

I made a deprecating gesture, which he negatived with a good-humoured
shrug.

"Oh, I didn't care a straw when I believed in myself--and now it's an
added tie between us!"

He laughed slightly, without bitterness, and pushed one of the deep
arm-chairs forward. "There: make yourself comfortable--and here are the
cigars you like."

He placed them at my elbow and continued to wander up and down the
room, stopping now and then beneath the picture.

"How it happened? I can tell you in five minutes--and it didn't take
much longer to happen.... I can remember now how surprised and pleased
I was when I got Mrs. Stroud's note. Of course, deep dow