to Stanwell to symbolize his
artistic endeavour).

"Why can't a man--why can't he? You ask me that, Stanwell?" he blazed
out.

"Yes; and what's more, I'll answer you: it isn't everybody who can
adapt his art as he wants to!"

Caspar stood before him, gasping with incredulous scorn. "Adapt his
art? As he wants to? Unhappy wretch, what lingo are you talking? If you
mean that it isn't every honest man who can be a renegade--"

"That's just what I do mean: he can't unless he's clever enough to see
the other side."

The deep groan with which Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by a
knock at the studio door, which thereupon opened to admit a small
dapperly-dressed man with a silky moustache and mildly-bulging eyes.

"Ah, Mungold," exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with
which Arran received the new-comer; whereat the latter, with the air of
a man who does not easily believe himself unwelcome, bestowed a
sympathetic pressure on the sculptor's hand.

"My dear chap, I've just met Miss Arran, and she told me you were laid
up with a bad cold, so I thought I'd pop in and cheer you up a little."

He looked about him with a smile evidently intended as the first act in
his beneficent programme.

Mr. Mungold, freshly soaped and scented, with a neat glaze of gentility
extending from his varnished boot-tips to his glossy hat, looked like
the "flattered" portrait of a common man--just such an idealized
presentment as his own brush might have produced. As a rule, however,
he devoted himself to the portrayal of the other sex, painting ladies
in syrup, as Arran said, with marsh-mallow children leaning against
their knees. He was as quick as a dressmaker at catching new ideas, and
the style of his pictures changed as rapidly as that of the
fashion-plates. One year all his sitters were done on oval canvases,
with gauzy draperies and a background of clouds; the next they were
seated under an immemorial elm, caressing enormous dogs obviously
constructed out of door-mats. Whatever their occupation they always
looked straight out of the canvas, giving the impression that their
eyes were fixed on an invisible camera. This gave rise to the rumour
that Mungold "did" his portraits from photographs; it was even said
that he had invented a way of transferring an enlarged photograph to
the canvas, so that all that remained was to fill in the colours. If he
heard of this charge he took it calmly, but probably it had not reache