“I don’t mind your seeing my work, because you don’t talk about it,” he said, glancing at Rainham quickly.  “I hate people who try to say complimentary things; they don’t often mean them, and when they do they talk absolute rot.”

“Yes,” said the other sympathetically.  “Shall I put a slice of lemon in your tea?  I suppose I must live up to my reputation and say nothing about your sketch.  But I must have it when it’s finished!  It’s always most embarrassing to have to pay personal compliments, though I suppose some people like them.”

The painter grunted inarticulately between two sips of tea.

“Like them!  Don’t your society artists and authors simply wallow in them?  Have you got any cigarettes, or papers?  I dropped mine into a puddle.  Ah, thanks....  That’s a pretty face.  Whose is it?”

The cigarette case, which Rainham handed to his guest, was a well-worn leather one, a somewhat ladylike article, with a photograph fitted into the dividing flap inside.  Before answering the question he looked at the photograph absently for a moment, when the case had been returned to him.

“It’s not a very good photograph.  It’s meant for—­for Mrs. Lightmark, when she was a little girl.  She gave me the case with the portrait years ago, in Florence.”

Oswyn glanced at him curiously and shrewdly through a thin haze of blue smoke, watching him restore the faded, little receptacle almost reverentially to the breast-pocket of his coat.

“Have you been to the Chamber of Horrors?” he asked suddenly, after a silent pause, broken only by the ceaseless lashing of the window by the raindrops.

Rainham looked up with a start, half puzzled, seeking and finding an explanation in the faint, conscious humour which loosened the lines about the speaker’s mouth.

“The Chamber of——­ Do you mean the R.A.?  You do, you most irreverent of mortals!  No, I have not been yet.  Will you go with me?”

“Heaven forbid!  I have been once.”

“You have?  And they didn’t scalp you?”

“I didn’t stay long enough, I suppose.  I only went to see one picture—­Lightmark’s.”

“Ah, that’s just what I want to see!  And you know I still have a weakness for the show.  I expect you would like the new Salon better.”

“There are good things there,” said Oswyn tersely, “and a great many abominations as well.  I was over in Paris last week.”

Rainham glanced at him over his cup with a certain surprise.

“I didn’t know you ever went there now,” he remarked.

“No, I never go if I can help it.  I hate Paris; it is triste as a well, and full of ghosts.  Ghosts!  It’s a city of the dead.  But I had a picture there this time, and I went to look at it.”

“In the new Salon?”