Page:Robert Barr - Lord Stranleigh Philanthropist.djvu/63

 refinement, but the stamp of starvation was visible on the pallid features. It reminded him of one of the six pictures drawn by the late to illustrate Dickens; the picture of Sidney Carton about to mount the scaffold, and looking back over his shoulder with the same wistful expression which was now before him in life.

Stranleigh remembered Fred Barnard with a pang of regret. One night, when they were dining together, Barnard had told him the history of the picture; how he searched in vain through London and Paris for any man whose face would realise his own dream of Sidney Carton. Then one night, under a lamp-post in Paris, he caught a momentary glimpse of the person who fulfilled his requirements, with refined features softened by the grief of a saviour, but the face was that of a woman, and he finished his well-known picture by placing a woman's head on a man's body.

Here, then, at last, was a fitting subject for any beneficence the young nobleman cared to bestow. Despite his evident hunger, the stranger appeared lost in some ecstatic dream, and he did not hear Stranleigh approach, but started when the latter accosted him, awakening from his reverie as if he knew not where he was.