s strength and experience, he found himself too shamefaced to
"abuse" further the courtesy that had been extended to him. The
consciousness, too, of his growing poverty was becoming acuter and
acuter. Already he was drawing back into his shell, and, once he had
ceased going to Grosvenor Place for the sake of his work, he had not the
heart to continue his visits as an ordinary acquaintance. More than a
year afterwards he read of Lady Betty's engagement in the papers--it
was the very match one would naturally look for. Yet the news "shattered
him to bits"--absurdly enough, he told himself, since he had known her
at best irregularly, and not in the ordinary course of social intimacy.
He was really half-surprised at receiving an invitation to the wedding.
He could not prevail on himself to go; but, remembering she had once
admired one of his Academy pictures, he sent her a photograph of it on a
miniature silver easel as a trifling wedding gift. She wrote back a
gracious acknowledgment, which had since remained one of his treasures.

Meanwhile he had been struggling on with the picture, determined to
conquer. But its difficulties and problems were endless. After all his
toil it stood on his easel in a terribly unfinished condition, though he
had stinted his own body to lavish his money on it. At last, gulping
down the humiliation, he was forced to accept of Mary's little store of
savings to pay his rent and his models. It was his first step of the
kind, and he paid the full proverbial cost of it. But he had still the
hope of returning the loan a thousandfold. Was not his success to redeem
her life as well as his?

Certainly Mary believed in him and the picture, and looked forward to
its scoring a great triumph. The whole heart and hope of the sister
centred on that vast canvas. She sometimes ran across town to see it,
though--poor child!--Hyde Park Corner always looked the same to her at
every stage of its long creation. But the picture was Wyndham's
backbone; it was his stock-in-trade before his world. He was more and
more of a recluse now, refusing all invitations, discouraging his
friends from coming to interrupt him--as he put it. Certainly Wyndham
would rather have died than confess to failure after all the magnificent
trumpeting. Even as it was, the time came soon enough when the big
picture no longer served to protect his dignity. He imagined
half-pitying glances and ironic smiles, and so eventually he found
himself