a man could who was necessarily so much taken up with himself, he was sorry for Conrad’s father; Beaton had a peculiar tenderness for his own father, and he imagined how his father would feel if it were he who had been killed in Conrad’s place, as it might very well have been; he sympathized with himself in view of the possibility; and for once they were mistaken who thought him indifferent and merely brutal in his failure to appear at Lindau’s obsequies.

He would really have gone if he had known how to reconcile his presence in that house with the terms of his effective banishment from it; and he was rather forgivingly finding himself wronged in the situation, when Dryfoos knocked at the studio door the morning after Lindau’s funeral.  Beaton roared out, “Come in!” as he always did to a knock if he had not a model; if he had a model he set the door slightly ajar, and with his palette on his thumb frowned at his visitor and told him he could not come in.  Dryfoos fumbled about for the knob in the dim passageway outside, and Beaton, who had experience of people’s difficulties with it, suddenly jerked the door open.  The two men stood confronted, and at first sight of each other their quiescent dislike revived.  Each would have been willing to turn away from the other, but that was not possible.  Beaton snorted some sort of inarticulate salutation, which Dryfoos did not try to return; he asked if he could see him alone for a minute or two, and Beaton bade him come in, and swept some paint-blotched rags from the chair which he told him to take.  He noticed, as the old man sank tremulously into it, that his movement was like that of his own father, and also that he looked very much like Christine.  Dryfoos folded his hands tremulously on the top of his horn-handled stick, and he was rather finely haggard, with the dark hollows round his black eyes and the fall of the muscles on either side of his chin.  He had forgotten to take his soft, wide-brimmed hat off; and Beaton felt a desire to sketch him just as he sat.

Dryfoos suddenly pulled himself together from the dreary absence into which he fell at first.  “Young man,” he began, “maybe I’ve come here on a fool’s errand,” and Beaton rather fancied that beginning.

But it embarrassed him a little, and he said, with a shy glance aside, “I don’t know what you mean.”  “I reckon,” Dryfoos answered, quietly, “you got your notion, though.  I set that woman on to speak to you the way she done.  But if there was anything wrong in the way she spoke, or if you didn’t feel like she had any right to question you up as if we suspected you of anything mean, I want you to say so.”

Beaton said nothing, and the old man went on.

“I ain’t very well up in the ways of the world, and I don’t pretend to be.  All I want is to be fair and square with everybody.  I’ve made mistakes, though, in my time—­” He stopped, and Beaton was not proof against the misery of his face, which was twisted as with some strong physical ache.  “I don’t know as I want to make any more, if I can help it.  I don’t know but what you had a right to keep on comin’, and if you had I want you to say so.  Don’t you be afraid but what I’ll take it in the right way.  I don’t want to take advantage of anybody, and I don’t ask you to say any more than that.”