of your work as
have to do with Sir Hugh's personal life. I have always asked that
privilege."

MacMaster hastily assured her as to this, adding, "I mean to touch on
only such facts in his personal life as have to do directly with his
work--such as his monkish education under Ghillini."

"I see your meaning, I think," said Lady Ellen, looking at him with
wide, uncomprehending eyes.

When MacMaster stopped at the studio on leaving the house he stood for
some time before Treffinger's one portrait of himself, that brigand of
a picture, with its full throat and square head; the short upper lip
blackened by the close-clipped mustache, the wiry hair tossed down over
the forehead, the strong white teeth set hard on a short pipestem. He
could well understand what manifold tortures the mere grain of the man's
strong red and brown flesh might have inflicted upon a woman like Lady
Ellen. He could conjecture, too, Treffinger's impotent revolt against
that very repose which had so dazzled him when it first defied his
daring; and how once possessed of it, his first instinct had been to
crush it, since he could not melt it.

Toward the close of the season Lady Ellen Treffinger left town.
MacMaster's work was progressing rapidly, and he and James wore away
the days in their peculiar relation, which by this time had much of
friendliness. Excepting for the regular visits of a Jewish picture
dealer, there were few intrusions upon their solitude. Occasionally
a party of Americans rang at the little door in the garden wall,
but usually they departed speedily for the Moorish hall and tinkling
fountain of the great show studio of London, not far away.

This Jew, an Austrian by birth, who had a large business in Melbourne,
Australia, was a man of considerable discrimination, and at once
selected the _Marriage of Phaedra_ as the object of his especial
interest. When, upon his first visit, Lichtenstein had declared the
picture one of the things done for time, MacMaster had rather warmed
toward him and had talked to him very freely. Later, however, the man's
repulsive personality and innate vulgarity so wore upon him that, the
more genuine the Jew's appreciation, the more he resented it and the
more base he somehow felt it to be. It annoyed him to see Lichtenstein
walking up and down before the picture, shaking his head and blinking
his watery eyes over his nose glasses, ejaculating: "Dot is a chem, a
chem! It is wordt to gome den dousant m