“Well—­whether Rosamund doesn’t a little regret?”

“Do you?” asked Will, without looking round.

“I?  Not for a moment, my dear boy!  She did me the greatest possible kindness—­only you even did me a greater.  At this moment I should have been cursing and smoking cheap tobacco in Battersea—­ unless I had got sick of it all and done the hic jacet business, a strong probability.  Never did a girl behave more sensibly.  Some day I hope to tell her so; of course when she has married somebody else.  Then I’ll paint her portrait, and make her the envy of a season—­ by Jove, I will!  Splendid subject, she’d be. . . .  When I think of that beastly so-called portrait that I put my foot through, the day I was in hell!  Queer how one develops all at a jump.  Two years ago I could no more paint a woman’s portrait than I could build a cathedral.  I caught the trick in the Slummer, but didn’t see all it meant till Blackstaffe asked me to paint Lady Rockett.—­Rosamund ought to have given me the sack when she saw that daub, meant for her.  Good little girl; she held as long as she could.  Oh, I’ll paint her divinely, one of these days.”

The soft humming of a gong summoned them to another room, where lunch was ready.  Never had Warburton showed such lack of genial humour at his friend’s table.  He ate mechanically, and spoke hardly at all.  Little by little, Franks felt the depressing effect of this companionship.  When they returned to the studio, to smoke by the fireside, only a casual word broke the cheerless silence.

“I oughtn’t to have come to-day,” said Will, at length, half apologetically.  “I feel like a bear with a sore head.  I think I’m going.”

“Shall I come and see you some evening?” asked the other in his friendliest tone.

“No—­I mean not just yet.—­I’ll write and ask you.”

And Will went out into the frosty gloom.

CHAPTER 24

By way of Allchin, who knew all the gossip of the neighbourhood, Warburton learnt that his new competitor in trade was a man with five children and a wife given to drink; he had been in business in another part of London, and was suspected to have removed with the hope that new surroundings might help his wife to overcome her disastrous failing.  A very respectable man, people said; kind husband, good father, honest dealer.  But Allchin reported, with a twinkle of the eye, that all his capital had gone in the new start, and it was already clear that his business did not thrive.

“We shall starve him out!” cried the assistant, snapping his thumb and finger.

“And what’ll become of him then?” asked Will.

“Oh, that’s for him to think about,” replied Allchin.  “Wouldn’t he starve us, if he could, sir?”