I looked in his face; the expression of solemn earnestness was quite unmistakable.

‘It is not you,’ I said, ’it is Heaven, or else it is the blind jester Circumstance, that is playing this joke upon me!’

‘To your honoured father,’ he continued, taking not the slightest notice of my interjection, ’I owe everything.  From his grave he supports my soul; from his grave he gives me ideas; from his grave he makes my fame.  How should I fail to honour his son, even though he—­’

Of course he was going to add—­’even though he be a vagabond associating with vagabonds,’—­but he left the sentence unfinished.

‘I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,’ said I, ’that you speak in such enigmas that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.’

‘I wish,’ said Wilderspin, ’that all enigmas were as soluble as this.  Let me ask you a question, sir.  When you stood before my picture, “Faith and Love,” in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it and the predella were inspired entirely by your father’s great work, The Veiled Queen, or rather that they are mere pictorial renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man’s soul in its loftiest development?’

I had never heard of the picture in question.  As for the book, my father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply antiquarian kind.  In Switzerland, however, after his death, while waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a few days’ reading, acquainted with The Veiled Queen.  It was a new edition containing an ‘added chapter,’ full of subtle spiritualistic symbols.  Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man’s reason, not by such researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of burning eloquence.

‘I am sorry to say,’ I replied, ’that my Gypsy wanderings are again answerable for my shortcomings.  I have not yet seen your picture.  When I do see it I—­’

’Not seen “Faith and Love” and the equally wonderful predella at the foot of it!’ he exclaimed incredulously.  ’Ah, but you have been living among the Gypsies.  It is the greatest picture of the modern world; for, Mr. Aylwin, it renders in Art the inevitable attitude of its own time and country towards the unseen world, and renders it as completely as did the masterpiece of Polygnotus in the Lesche of the Cnidians at Delphi—­as completely as did the wonderful frescoes of Andrea Orcagna on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa.’

’And you attribute your success to the inspiration you derived from my father’s hook?’

‘To that and to the spirit of Mary Wilderspin in heaven.’

‘Then you are a Spiritualist?’

‘I am an Aylwinian, the opposite (need I say?) of a Darwinian.’