TER IV. ~ A LILY OF THE FIELD.

THIS was the significant and poetic appellation which at once attached
itself to Ralph Gowan after his first visit to the studio in Bloomsbury
Place, and, as might have been expected, it was a fancy of Dolly's, the
affixing of significant titles being one of her _fortes_.

"The lilies of the field," she observed, astutely, "are a distinct
class. They toil not, neither do they spin, and yet Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like one of these. Yes, my young friends, Mr.
Ralph Gowan is a lily of the field."

And she was not far wrong. Twenty-seven years before Mr. Ralph Gowan
had been presented to an extended circle of admiring friends as the sole
heir to a fortune large enough to have satisfied the ambitions of half
a dozen heirs of moderate aspirations, and from that time forward his
lines had continually fallen in pleasant places. As a boy he had been
handsome, attractive, and thoroughbred, and consequently popular; his
good looks made him a favorite with women, his good fortune with men;
his friends were rather proud of him, and his enemies were powerless
against him; he found it easy to be amiable because no obstacles to
amiability lay in his path; and altogether he regarded existence as a
comfortable enough affair.

At school his fellows had liked him just as boys as well as men are apt
to like fortunate people; and as he had grown older he had always found
himself a favorite, it may be for something of the same reason. But
being, happily, a gentleman by nature, he had not been much spoiled by
the general adulation. Having been born to it, he carried himself easily
through it, scarcely recognizing the presence of what would have been
patent to men less used to popularity. He was fond of travelling, and so
had amused himself by comfortably arranging uncomfortable journeys and
exploring pleasantly those parts of the earth which to ordinary tourists
would appear unattainable.

He was not an ordinary young man, upon the whole, which was evinced by
his making no attempt to write a book of travels, though he might safely
have done so; and really, upon the whole, "lily of the field" though
chance had made him, he was neither useless nor purposeless, and rather
deserved his good luck than otherwise.

Perhaps it was because he was not an ordinary individual that his fancy
was taken by the glimpse he had caught of life in Vagabondia. It was
his first glimpse of the inner workings of