The little organ was muttering softly to itself as they entered.  It was very still otherwise.  The morning sun struck through the stained windows and made pretty lights about the altar; besides themselves there were some half dozen other worshippers.  The little organ ceased with a long droning sigh, and the minister in his white robes turned about, facing his auditors, and in the midst of a great silence opened the communion service with the words:  “Ye who do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins and are in love and charity with your neighbours—­”

As Vandover rose with the rest the blood rushed to his head and a feeling of nausea and exhaustion, the dregs of his previous night’s debauch, came over him again for a moment, so that he took hold of the back of the pew in front of him to steady himself.

Chapter Five

In the afternoons Vandover worked in his studio, which was on Sacramento Street, but in the mornings he was accustomed to study in the life-class at the School of Design.

This was on California Street over the Market, an immense room partitioned by enormous wooden screens into alcoves, where the still-life classes worked, painting carrots, grapes, and dusty brown stone-jugs.

All about were a multitude of casts, the fighting gladiator, the discobulus, the Venus of Milo, and hundreds of smaller pieces, masks, torsos, and the heads of the Parthenon horses.  Flattened paint-tubes and broken bits of charcoal littered the floor and cluttered the chairs and shelves.  A strong odour of turpentine and fixative was in the air, mingled with the stronger odours of linseed oil and sour, stale French bread.

Every afternoon a portrait class of some thirty-odd assembled in one of the larger alcoves near the door.  Several of the well-known street characters of the city had posed for this class, and at one time Father Elphick, the white-haired, bare-headed vegetarian, with his crooked stick and white clothes, had sat to it for his head.

Vandover was probably the most promising member of the school.  His style was sketchy, conscientious, and full of strength and decision.  He worked in large lines, broad surfaces and masses of light or shade.  His colour was good, running to purples, reds, and admirable greens, full of bitumen and raw sienna.

Though he had no idea of composition, he was clever enough to acknowledge it.  His finished pictures were broad reaches of landscape, deserts, shores, and moors in which he placed solitary figures of men or animals in a way that was very effective—­as, for instance, a great strip of shore and in the foreground the body of a drowned sailor; a lion drinking in the midst of an immense Sahara; or, one that he called “The Remnant of an Army,” a dying war horse wandering on an empty plain, the saddle turned under his belly, his mane and tail snarled with burrs.