’Oh dear, no; not yet.  I mean to get her to do so.  There’s a strength about her, which would make her sit the part admirably.  And I fancy she would like to be driving a nail into a fellow’s head.  I think I shall take Musselboro for a Sisera.’

‘You’re not in earnest?’

’He would just do for it.  But of course I shan’t ask him to sit, as my Jael would not like it.  She would not consent to operate on so base a subject.  So you really are going to Guestwick?’

’Yes; I start tomorrow.  Good-bye, old fellow.  I’ll come and sit for Sisera if you’ll let me;—­only Miss Van Jael shall have a blunted nail, if you please.’

Then Johnny left the artist’s room and walked from Kensington to Lady Demoline’s house.  As he went he partly accused himself and partly excused himself in that matter of his love for Lily Dale.  There were moments of his life in which he felt that he would willingly die for her—­that life was not worth having without her—­in which he went about inwardly reproaching fortune for having treated him so cruelly.  Why should she not be his?  He half believed that she loved him.  She had almost told him so.  She could not surely still love that other man who had treated her with such vile falsehood?  As he considered the question in all its bearings he assured himself over and over again that there would be now no fear of that rival;—­and yet he had such fears, and hated Crosbie almost as much as ever.  It was a thousand pities, certainly, that the man should have been made free by the death of his wife.  But it could hardly be that he should seek to see Lily again, or that Lily, if so sought, should even listen to him.  But yet there he was, free once more—­an odious being, whom Johnny was determined to sacrifice to his vengeance, if cause for such sacrifice should occur.  And thus thinking of the real truth of his love, he endeavoured to excuse himself to himself from that charge of vagueness and laxness which his friend Conway Dalrymple had brought against him.  And then again he accused himself of the same sin.  If he had been positively in earnest, with downright manly earnestness, would he have allowed the thing to drag itself with a weak uncertain life, as it had done for the last two or three years?  Lily Dale had been a dream to him in his boyhood; and he had made a reality of his dream as soon as he had become a man.  But before he had been able, as a man, to tell his love to the girl whom he had loved as a child, another man had intervened, and his prize had been taken from him.  Then the wretched victor had thrown his treasure away, and he, John Eames, had been content to stoop to pick it up—­was content to do so now.  But there was something which he felt to be unmanly in the constant stooping.  Dalrymple had told him that he was like a man who is ever writing a book and yet never writes it.  He would do his very best to make Lily his own.  But if he failed now, he would have done with it.  It seemed to him to be below his dignity as a man to be always coveting a thing which he could not obtain.