illors. He then
shut himself up, denied himself to all visitors, and sat down to work,
patient and eager as a young student. For a while he laboured day and
night. But how unsatisfactory, how cruelly ungrateful was all that grew
under his pencil! Each moment he found himself checked and repulsed in
the new path he fain would have trodden by the wretched mechanical
tricks to which he had so long habituated himself. They stood on his
road, an impassable barrier. In spite of himself he recurred to the old
commonplace forms; the arms would arrange themselves in one graceless
position; the head assume the old hackneyed attitude; the folds of dress
refused to drape themselves otherwise than they had so long been wont to
do in his hands. All this the unhappy artist plainly felt and saw. His
eyes were opened to his heinous faults, but he lacked the power to
correct them.

"Surely I _had_ ability!" said he to himself; "or was it mere delusion?
Could I not, under any circumstances, have done better than I have? Did
the whispers of youthful vanity mislead me?" And, to settle this doubt,
he hunted out some of his early pictures, which lay neglected in a
corner of his painting-room--pictures he had laboured at long ago, when
his heart was pure from avarice, and he dwelt in his poor garret in the
lonely Vasilievskue Ostrov, far from the world, from luxury and
covetousness. He examined them attentively, and the conviction forced
itself upon him with irresistible strength, that he had sacrificed
genius at the altar of Mammon. "I had it in me!" was his agonised
exclamation. "Every where, in all of these, I behold traces and proofs
of the power I have recklessly frittered away."

Covering his face with his hands, Tchartkoff stood silent, full of
bitter thoughts, rapidly but minutely reviewing the whole of his past
life. When he removed his hands he started, and a thrill passed over
him, for he suddenly encountered the gaze of two piercing eyes
glittering with a sombre lustre, and seeming to watch and enjoy his
despair. A second glance showed him they belonged to the strange
portrait which he had bought, many years before, in the Stchukin Dvor.
It had remained forgotten and concealed amidst a mass of old pictures,
and he had long since forgotten its existence. Now that the gaudy,
fashionable pictures and portraits had been removed from the studio,
there it was, peering grimly out from amongst his early productions.
Tchartkoff remembered