itely that his vogue had ended. She could not even find
anything of his in the magazines, though she purchased them prodigally,
and searched them through with a hope that was desperation, and a fear
that was well-nigh frenzy.

The last year or two a dead unnatural calm had settled over the studio.
Pictures were neither despatched nor returned: if models rang the bell,
it was only to turn away the next minute with disappointed faces. Of
fashionable visitors there was never a sign now: not even a comrade or
fellow-artist came to look him up. But only a tall, sad-faced girl, who
somehow resembled him, called there at long intervals, and Miss Robinson
envied this sister the sympathy she could bring him.

He did not leave London now. All through the summer he kept in town,
lying low, as Miss Robinson could well see from the pallor of his face
on her return from her own conventional holiday at the seaside. She
could cherish no delusions--he was a beaten man!

Time and again she brushed close to him, passing him by chance in the
street, and observed the languor of his step, the growing sadness of his
features. Other details did not escape her. There was no one to attend
on him; no one to care for him. Even a charwoman was a rarity at last,
and Wyndham could be seen shopping almost furtively in the adjoining
streets, and bearing back his own provisions to the studio. Miss
Robinson divined, under their wrappings, the tin of sardines, the potted
tongue, the loaf of bread. She knew that he never took a meal out now,
and that, if he left the studio in the daytime, it was only to escape
from the misery of solitude and hopelessness.

She alone observed him so minutely. Her mother had in some degree shared
her interest in his work, and had sometimes accompanied her to the
galleries; but the common interest of the family in their neighbour was
casual and fitful. Miss Robinson hardly dared mention his name now: it
seemed to her that to draw attention to his poverty was to humiliate
him. Besides, she feared to reveal her own emotion.

One day Miss Robinson's own life caught her with a breathless upheaval.
An honoured and intimate friend of her father's, successful, opulent,
came forward with an avowal of esteem for her; deferentially desired her
association with him in his second essay in matrimony! Mr. Shanner
seemed to spring it on her with untempered abruptness; though the
attentive courtesies that had preceded the crisis might ha