u. But if you're
a wise boy and know what's good for you, you'll stick to Mr. Barney
Bill and the freedom of the high-road and the light heart of the
vagabond. You'll have a devilish sight more happiness in the end."

But Paul, who already looked upon his gipsy self as dead as his
Bludston self, and these dead selves as stepping-stones to higher
things, turned a deaf ear to his new friend's paradoxical philosophy.
"I'll remember," said he. "Mr. W. W. Rowlatt, 4, Gray's Inn Square."

The young architect watched the van with its swinging, creaking
excrescences lumber away down the hot and dusty road, and turned with a
puzzled expression to his easel. Joy in the Little Bear Inn had for the
moment departed. Presently he found himself scribbling a letter in
pencil to his brother, the Royal Academician.

"So you see, my dear fellow," he wrote toward the end of the epistle,
"I am in a quandary. That the little beggar is of startling beauty is
undeniable. That he has got his bill agape, like a young bird, for
whatever food of beauty and emotion and knowledge comes his way is
obvious to any fool. But whether, in what I propose, I'm giving a
helping hand to a kind of wild genius, or whether I'm starting a vain
boy along the primrose path in the direction of everlasting bonfire,
I'm damned if I know."

But Paul jogged along by the side of Barney Bill in no such state of
dubiety. God was in His Heaven, arranging everything for his especial
benefit. All was well with the world where dazzling destinies like his
were bound to be fulfilled.

"I've heard of such things," said Barney Bill with a reflective twist
of his head, when Paul had told him of Mr. Rowlatt's suggestion. "A
cousin of mine married a man who knew a gal who used to stand in her
birthday suit in front of a lot of young painter chaps-and I'm bound to
say he used to declare she was as good a gal as his own wife,
especially seeing as how she supported an old father what had got a
stroke, and a houseful of young brothers and sisters. So I'm not saying
there's any harm in it. And I wouldn't stand in your way, sonny, seeing
as how you want to get to your 'igh-born parents. You might find 'em on
the road, and then again you mightn't. And thirty bob a week at
fourteen-no-it would be flying in the face of Providence to say 'don't
do it! But what licks me is: what the blazes do they want with a little
varmint like you? Why shouldn't they pay thirty bob a week to paint me?"