This is my nearest way; and I promised Mat--"

"Remember what you promised _me,_ and what I am going to promise your
mother--"

"I'll remember everything, Blyth. Good bye and thank you. Only wait till
we meet on Saturday, and you see my new friend; and you will find it all
right."

"I hope I shan't find it all wrong," said Mr. Blyth, forebodingly, as he
followed the road to his own house.

CHAPTER V. FATE WORKS, WITH MR. BLYTH FOR AN INSTRUMENT.

The great day of the year in Valentine's house was always the day on
which his pictures for the Royal Academy Exhibition were shown in their
completed state to friends and admiring spectators, congregated in his
own painting room. His visitor represented almost every variety of rank
in the social scale; and grew numerous in proportion as they descended
from the higher to the lower degrees. Thus, the aristocracy of race
was usually impersonated, in his studio, by his one noble patron, the
Dowager Countess of Brambledown; the aristocracy of art by two or three
Royal Academicians; and the aristocracy of money by eight or ten highly
respectable families, who came quite as much to look at the Dowager
Countess as to look at the pictures. With these last, the select portion
of the company might be said to terminate; and, after them, flowed in
promiscuously the obscure majority of the visitors--a heterogeneous
congregation of worshippers at the shrine of art, who were some of them
of small importance, some of doubtful importance, some of no importance
at all; and who included within their numbers, not only a sprinkling of
Mr. Blyth's old-established tradesmen, but also his gardener, his wife's
old nurse, the brother of his housemaid, and the father of his cook.
Some of his respectable friends deplored, on principle, the "leveling
tendencies" which induced him thus to admit a mixture of all classes
into his painting-room, on the days when he exhibited his pictures.
But Valentine was warmly encouraged in taking this course by no less a
person than Lady Brambledown herself, whose perverse pleasure it was to
exhibit herself to society as an uncompromising Radical, a reviler of
the Peerage, a teller of scandalous Royal anecdotes, and a worshipper of
the memory of Oliver Cromwell.

On the eventful Saturday which was to display his works to an applauding
public of private friends, Mr. Blyth's studio, thanks to Madonna's
industry and attention, looked really in perfect order--as ne