'Deeply indebted, indeed!' exclaimed he in a fervid tone, taking a chair and playing with his hat between his knees, in his previous fashion when beginning one of his monologues. 'When I began "Faith and Love" I worked for weeks and months and years, having but one thought, how to give artistic rendering to the great idea of the Renascence of Wonder in Art symbolised in the vignette in your father's third edition. I was very poor then; but to live upon bread and water and paint a great picture, and know that you are being watched by loving eyes above,—there is no joy like that. I found a model—a fine and beautiful woman, the same magnificent blonde who sat for so many of the Master's greatest pictures. For a long time my work delighted me; but after awhile a suspicion, and then a sickening dread, came upon me that all was not well with the picture. And then the withering truth broke in upon me, the scales fell from my eyes—the model's face was beautiful, but it was not right; the expression I wanted was as far off as ever; there was but one right expression in the world, and that I could not find. Ah! is there any pain like that of discovering that all the toil of years has been in vain, that the best you can do—the best that the spiritual world permits you to do—is as far off the goal as when you began?'

'And so you failed after all, Mr. Wilderspin?' I said, anxious to get him away so that I might talk to Cyril alone upon the one subject at my heart.

'I told the model I should want her no more,' said Wilderspin, 'and for two days and nights I sat in the studio in a dream, and could get nothing to pass my lips but bread and water. Then it was that Mary Wilderspin, my mother, remembered me, blessed me—sent me a spiritual body—'

'For God's sake!' I whispered to Cyril, 'take the good madman away; you don't know how his prattle harrows me just now.'

'Ah! never,' said Wilderspin, 'shall I forget that sunny morning when was first revealed to me—'

'My dear fellow,' said Cyril, 'to tell the adventures of that sunny morning would, as I know from experience, keep us here for the next three hours. So, as I must not miss my train, and as you cannot spare a second from "Ruth and Boaz," come along.'

While I was accompanying them through the corridors of the hotel, Cyril said: 'You say he is not in love with his model? Don't you see the sulky looks he gives me? I was the innocent cause of an unlucky catastrophe with her. I'll tell you about that, however, another time. Good-bye; I'm off to Paris.'

'When you return to London,' I said to Cyril, 'I wish to consult you upon, a matter that concerns me deeply.'

II

On re-entering my room, as I stood and gazed at my father's book The Veiled Queen, I understood something about that fascination which the bird feels who goes fluttering to the serpent's jaws from sheer repulsion. 'Am I indeed,' I asked myself, 'that same Darwinian student who in Switzerland not long since turned over in scorn these pages, where are enshrined superstitious stories as gross as any of those told in Fenella Stanley's ignorant letters?'