er brother-in-law.
Treffinger was, indeed, the last man who should have married into
the Percy family. The son of a small tobacconist, he had grown up a
sign-painter's apprentice; idle, lawless, and practically letterless
until he had drifted into the night classes of the Albert League, where
Ghillini sometimes lectured. From the moment he came under the eye and
influence of that erratic Italian, then a political exile, his life
had swerved sharply from its old channel. This man had been at once
incentive and guide, friend and master, to his pupil. He had taken the
raw clay out of the London streets and molded it anew. Seemingly he had
divined at once where the boy's possibilities lay, and had thrown aside
every canon of orthodox instruction in the training of him. Under
him Treffinger acquired his superficial, yet facile, knowledge of the
classics; had steeped himself in the monkish Latin and medieval romances
which later gave his work so naive and remote a quality. That was the
beginning of the wattle fences, the cobble pave, the brown roof beams,
the cunningly wrought fabrics that gave to his pictures such a richness
of decorative effect.

As he had told Lady Mary Percy, MacMaster had found the imperative
inspiration of his purpose in Treffinger's unfinished picture,
the _Marriage of Phaedra_. He had always believed that the key to
Treffinger's individuality lay in his singular education; in the _Roman
de la Rose_, in Boccaccio, and Amadis, those works which had literally
transcribed themselves upon the blank soul of the London street boy,
and through which he had been born into the world of spiritual things.
Treffinger had been a man who lived after his imagination; and his mind,
his ideals and, as MacMaster believed, even his personal ethics, had to
the last been colored by the trend of his early training. There was in
him alike the freshness and spontaneity, the frank brutality and the
religious mysticism, which lay well back of the fifteenth century. In
the _Marriage of Phaedra_ MacMaster found the ultimate expression of
this spirit, the final word as to Treffinger's point of view.

As in all Treffinger's classical subjects, the conception was wholly
medieval. This Phaedra, just turning from her husband and maidens to
greet her husband's son, giving him her first fearsome glance from
under her half-lifted veil, was no daughter of Minos. The daughter of
_heathenesse_ and the early church she was; doomed to tortur