I worked for an hour; and then, for the purpose of making yet other notes, I rose, crossed the room, and took down the three or four illustrated books to which, in the earlier part of his career, Andriaovsky had put his name.  I carried them to the table, and twinkled as I opened the first of them.  It was a book of poems, and in making the designs for them Andriaovsky had certainly not found for himself.  Almost any one of the “Art Shades,” as he had called them, could have done the thing equally well, and I twinkled again.  I did not propose to have much mercy on that.  Already Schofield’s words had given birth to a suspicion in my mind—­that Andriaovsky, in permitting these fellows, Hallard, Connolly, and the rest, to suppose that he “thought highly” of them and their work, had been giving play to that malicious humour of his; and they naturally did not see the joke.  That joke, too, was between himself, dead, and me, preparing to write his “Life.”  As if he had been there to hear me, I chuckled, and spoke in a low voice.

“You were pulling their legs, Michael, you know.  A little rough on them you were.  But there’s a book here of yours that I’m going to tell the truth about.  You and I won’t pretend to one another.  It’s a rotten book, and both you and I know it....”

I don’t know what it was that caused me suddenly to see just then something that I had been looking at long enough without seeing—­that portrait of himself that I had set leaning against the back of a chair at the end of my writing-table.  It stood there, just within the soft penumbra of shadow cast by the silk-shaded light.  The canvas had been enlarged, the seam of it clumsily sewn by Andriaovsky’s own hand; but in that half-light the rough ridge of paint did not show, and I confess that the position and effect of the thing startled me for a moment.  Had I cared to play a trick with my fancy I could have imagined the head wagging from side to side, with such rage and fire was it painted.  He had had the temerity to dash a reflection across one of the glasses of his spectacles, concealing the eye behind it.  The next moment I had given a short laugh.

“So you’re there, are you?...  Well, I know you agree very heartily about that book of poems.  Heigho!  If I remember rightly, you made more money out of that book than out of the others put together.  But I’m going to tell the truth about it. I know better, you know....”

Chancing, before I turned in that night, to reopen one of his folios, I came across a drawing, there by accident, I don’t doubt, that confirmed me in my suspicion that Andriaovsky had had his quiet joke with Schofield, Hallard, Connolly and Co.  It was a sketch of Schofield’s, imitative, deplorable, a dreadful show-up of incapacity.  Well enough “drawn,” in a sense, it was ... and I remembered how Andriaovsky had ever urged that “drawing,” of itself, did not exist.  I winked at the portrait.  I saw his point.  He himself had no peer, and,