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18 the man who played écarté with your father on the 11th of August, ’53, I’ll find a proof of his guilt. Trust me to do that.”

“I will trust you, Richard.”

Mrs. Monckton held out her hand with a certain queenliness of gesture, as if she would thereby have ratified a bond between herself and her old friend; and as the flower of bygone chivalry were wont to vow the accomplishment of great deeds on the jewelled hilt of a cross-handled sword, so Richard Thornton, bending his honest head, swore allegiance upon the hand of Gilbert Monckton’s young wife.

“One word more, Mrs. Monckton,” said the scene-painter, “and then we had better leave off talking, or people will begin to wonder why we are so confidential and mysterious. This Mr. Darrell is an artist, I understand. Does he paint much?”

“Oh yes, a great deal; that is to say, he begins a great many things.”

“Precisely; he does a good many rough sketches, scraps of pencil and crayon, eh?”

“Yes.”

“And he fills portfolios with such scraps, and litters his studio with them?”

“Yes.”

“Then I must have a look at his studio, Mrs. Monckton. An artist—yes, even the poorest artist, the furthest away from the sublimity of genius, is sure to be fond of his art. He makes a confidant of it; he betrays a hundred secrets, that he keeps locked from every living creature, in the freedom of his studio. His pencil is the outer expression of his mind, and whatever falsehoods he may impose upon his fellow-men, his sketch-book will tell the truth. It will betray him when he is false, and reveal him when he is true. I must have a look at Launcelot Darrell’s studio, Mrs. Monckton. Let me see the man’s pictures, and I may be able to tell you more about the man himself.”

is only natural that one painter should take an interest in the work of another. Mr. Darrell testified no surprise, therefore, when Richard Thornton appeared at Hazlewood the morning after his arrival at Tolldale, under convoy of Mrs. Monckton and Laura.

“I’ve come to say how sorry I was at your not coming to dinner last night, dear Mrs. Darrell,” Laura said to the lady who was so soon to be her mother-in-law; “and I want to ask you whether I ought to have the sprigged muslin morning dresses trimmed with pink or blue, or whether I ought to have three of them pink and three blue, for Launcelot might get tired of seeing me in the same colours, you know, and I might have two of them trimmed with peach, if it came to that; and Eleanor has come with me; and Mr. Thornton—Mr. Thornton, Mrs. Darrell; Mrs. Darrell, Mr. Thornton—has come too, because he is an artist, and wants to see Launcelot’s pictures—especially the beautiful picture that’s going into the Academy, and that the committee is sure to hang on the line; and I’m sure Launcelot will let Mr. Thornton see his studio,—won’t you, dear Launcelot?”

Miss Mason pursed up her rosy lips, and put her head on one side like an insinuating canary, as she addressed her affianced husband. She looked very pretty in her winter costume, with a good deal of rich brown fur about her, and a dash of scarlet here and there. She looked like a fashionably-dressed Red Ridinghood, simple enough to be deluded by the weakest-minded of wolves. She was so pretty that her lover glanced down at her with a gratified smile, deriving considerable pleasure from the idea that she belonged to him, and that she was, on the whole, something to be rather proud of; something that added to the young sultan’s dignity, and bore testimony to his supreme merits.

Eleanor looked at the lovers with a contemptuous curve lifting her firm upper lip. She despised Launcelot Darrell so utterly, that she was almost cruel enough to despise Laura for loving him.

“Yes,” she thought, “Mr. Monckton is right. Shallow, selfish and frivolous! He is all these, and he is false as well. Heaven help you, Laura, if I cannot save you from a marriage with this man.”

Mr. Darrell was very well pleased to do the honours of his studio to Richard Thornton. It would be quite a new sort of thing to this scene-painting fellow, the embryo Academician thought: the poor devil would pick up fresh ideas, and get a glimpse at the higher regions of art for the first time in his life perhaps.

Launcelot Darrell led the way to that pleasant, prettily-furnished room which he called his studio. The “Rosalind and Celia” still occupied the post of honour on the easel. Mr. Darrell worked very hard, but in that spasmodic fashion which is antagonistic to anything like progress. The enthusiasm which upon one occasion kept him at his picture long after the fading light had given him notice to leave it, entirely deserted him upon another, and was perhaps followed by a fit of disgust with himself and with his art, which kept him idle for weeks together.

He made a merit of this fitfulness, depreciating a power of steady and persistent labour as the faculty of a tradesman, rather than an artist. He took credit to himself for the long pauses of idleness in which he waited for what he called inspiration; and imposed upon his mother by his grand talk about earnestness, conscientiousness, reverence for the sublimity of art, and a great many more fine phrases by which he contrived to excuse the simple fact of his laziness. So Eleanor Vane, as sorrowful Rosalind, still smiled sadly upon a simpering Celia:—it had been quite impossible to prevent Miss Mason’s assuming the conventional simper of the weak-minded sitter, who can’t forget that his portrait is being taken, and that he is in a manner in the very act of handing down his smile to posterity, or to the furniture brokers—out of an unfinished background, and clad in robes of unfinished satin and velvet. Mr. Thornton wondered as he looked at the young man’s work, and remembered how many miles of canvas it had been his own fate to cover since first he had handled his brushes, and splashed in sky borders and cloud pieces for the chief scene-painter at the Phœnix.