est motion towards the pictures.

Fenwick nodded haughtily, and walked towards the door. But his soul
smarted within him. Two years before, the owners of any picture-shop
in London would have received him with _empressement_, have shown him
all they had to show, and taken flattering note of his opinion.

On the threshold he ran against the Academician with the orange hair
and beard, who had been his fellow-guest at the Findon's on the night
of his first dinner-party there. The orange hair was now nearly white;
its owner had grown to rotundity; but the sharp, glancing eyes and
pompous manner were the same as of old. Mr. Sherratt nodded curtly to
Fenwick, and was then received with bows and effusion by the junior
partner standing behind.

'Ah, Mr. Sherratt!--_delighted_ to see you! Come to look at the Corot?
By all means! This way, please.'

Fenwick pursued his course to Oxford Street in a morbid
self-consciousness. It seemed to him that all the world knew him by
now for a failure and a bankrupt; that he was stared and pointed at.

He took refuge from this nightmare in an Oxford Street restaurant, and
as he ate his midday chop he asked himself, for the hundredth time,
how the deuce it was that he had got into the debts which weighed him
down. He had been extravagant on the building and furnishing of
his house--but after all he had earned large sums of money. He sat
gloomily over his meal--frowning--and trying to remember. And once,
amid the foggy darkness, there opened a vision of a Westmoreland
stream, and a pleading face upturned to his in the moonlight--'And
then, you know, I could look after money! You're _dreadfully_ bad
about money, John!'

The echo of that voice in his ears made him restless. He rose and set
forth again--toward Fitzroy Square.

On the way his thoughts recurred to the letter he had found waiting
for him at the lawyer's. It came from Phoebe's cousin, Freddy Tolson.
Messrs. Butlin had traced this man anew--to a mining town in New South
Wales. He had been asked to come to England and testify--no matter
at what expense. In the letter just received--bearing witness in its
improved writing and spelling to the prosperous development of the
writer--he declined to come, repeating that he knew nothing whatever
of his Cousin Phoebe's where-abouts, nor of her reasons for leaving
her husband. He gave a fresh and longer account of his conversation
with her, as far as he could remember it at this distance