ared? Must we do that? Is it an immutable law?"

"Perhaps for a time. Surely, surely, not forever," said Uniacke.

His guest's conversation and personality began to stir him more and more
powerfully. It seemed so new and vital an experience to be helped to
think, to have suggestion poured into him now, after his many lonely
island evenings.

"Ah, well, who can say?" said the painter. "I had the best for a
time--long enough for my immediate purpose; for now I painted, and I
felt that I was enabled by little Jack to do fine work. It seems he told
his drinking mother in Drury Lane, in his lingo, of the wonders of the
sea. This I learnt later. And, in his occasional, and now somewhat
fleeting visits to Trafalgar Square, he explained to the emaciated
little girls, in the shadow of Nelson, the fact that there was to be
found, and seen, somewhere, water of a very different kind from that
splashing and churning in the dingy basins guarded by the lions.
Meanwhile I painted little Jack, all the time keeping alive in his
nature the sea change, which was, in the end, to bring into my pocket
L1,000 in hard cash."

Sir Graham said this with an indescribable cold irony and bitterness.

"I can hear that money jingling in the wind, upon my soul, Uniacke," he
added, frowning heavily.

The young clergyman was touched by a passing thought of the painter's
notorious ill-health.

"Before the picture was finished--quite completed--the impish child
began to waken in the wonder-child, and I had to comply with the demands
of this new-born youngster. Our conversation--little Jack's and
mine--drifted from the sea itself to the men and ships that travel it,
to the deeds of men that are done upon it; raidings of Moorish pirates,
expeditions to the Spanish Main in old days, to the whaling grounds in
new, and so forth. When we got to this sort of thing my work was nearly
done and could not be spoiled. So I let myself go, and talked several
boys' books in those afternoons. I was satisfied, damnably
satisfied--your pardon, Uniacke--with my work, and I was heedless of all
else. That is the cursed, selfish instinct of the artist; that is the
inadvertence of which we spoke formerly. You remember?"

Uniacke nodded.

"My picture was before me and a child's budding soul, and I thought of
nothing at all but my picture. That's sin, if you like. Little Jack, in
his jersey and squeaky boots, with his pale face and great eyes, was my
prey on canvas and