he bean-stalk. I said persuasively to my hostess: "I
must really see your portrait, you know."

She glanced out almost timorously at the terrace where her husband,
lounging in a hooded chair, had lit a cigar and drawn the Russian
deerhound's head between his knees.

"Well, come while he's not looking," she said, with a laugh that tried
to hide her nervousness; and I followed her between the marble Emperors
of the hall, and up the wide stairs with terra-cotta nymphs poised among
flowers at each landing.

In the dimmest corner of her boudoir, amid a profusion of delicate and
distinguished objects, hung one of the familiar oval canvases, in the
inevitable garlanded frame. The mere outline of the frame called up all
Gisburn's past!

Mrs. Gisburn drew back the window-curtains, moved aside a jardiniere
full of pink azaleas, pushed an arm-chair away, and said: "If you stand
here you can just manage to see it. I had it over the mantel-piece, but
he wouldn't let it stay."

Yes--I could just manage to see it--the first portrait of Jack's I
had ever had to strain my eyes over! Usually they had the place
of honour--say the central panel in a pale yellow or rose Dubarry
drawing-room, or a monumental easel placed so that it took the light
through curtains of old Venetian point. The more modest place became the
picture better; yet, as my eyes grew accustomed to the half-light, all
the characteristic qualities came out--all the hesitations disguised
as audacities, the tricks of prestidigitation by which, with such
consummate skill, he managed to divert attention from the real business
of the picture to some pretty irrelevance of detail. Mrs. Gisburn,
presenting a neutral surface to work on--forming, as it were, so
inevitably the background of her own picture--had lent herself in an
unusual degree to the display of this false virtuosity. The picture
was one of Jack's "strongest," as his admirers would have put it--it
represented, on his part, a swelling of muscles, a congesting of
veins, a balancing, straddling and straining, that reminded one of the
circus-clown's ironic efforts to lift a feather. It met, in short, at
every point the demand of lovely woman to be painted "strongly" because
she was tired of being painted "sweetly"--and yet not to lose an atom of
the sweetness.

"It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable
pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself--"but the other doesn't
count, be