"You are quite a prophet," I said to the latter. "Your wedding gift, the picture, seems like a prediction of what happened to-day. Were you prepared for the event?"
"To a certain extent—yes," replied Angelo.
"Had you any reason for your belief other than George's strange appearance at Charing Cross last night?"
"Well, a day or two after I was introduced to Captain Willard, I congratulated him on his approaching marriage. His face changed at once from gay to grave. 'Don't allude to it,' he said; 'it may, perhaps, never take place.' I thought this strange language from one who had come all the way from India to be married, and asked him to explain himself, but he was silent. Since then, on one or two occasions when I have alluded to the wedding he would become melancholy in an instant; and I began to surmise that all was not right."
"Your surmises were only too well founded," I said.
And I began to tell the story of my night adventure. For a long time we sat discussing the affair, and devising all kinds of theories to account for George's flight.
"I can't understand it at all," said my perplexed uncle. "There was nothing strange or unusual in his manner last night when he left us. He talked in the most natural way of the wedding—said he would be at the church by 9:30 prompt. And yet he must have written that letter soon after he parted from us, for he left here about ten o'clock, and it is dated, you see, just an hour later."
"And he must have posted it before midnight, too," said Angelo, "or it would not have arrived here by the morning post. Strange things must have happened in those two hours to change the current of his life."
Shortly afterwards he rose, saying with a smile, "Art is long, and time is fleeting."
"Il Divino cannot leave his easel, you see," remarked my uncle, after the departure of the artist, "not even for one day."