“Out of sorts?” asked the other, as they entered the large well-warmed studio “You look rather bad.”

“Leave me alone,” muttered Warburton.

“All right.  Sit down here and thaw yourself.”

But Will’s eye had fallen on a great canvas, showing the portrait of a brilliant lady who reclined at ease and caressed the head of a great deer-hound.  He went and stood before it.

“Who’s that?”

“Lady Caroline—­I told you about her—­don’t you think it’s rather good?”

“Yes.  And for that very reason I’m afraid it’s bad.”

The artist laughed.

“That’s good satire on the critics.  When anything strikes them as good—­by a new man, that is—­they’re ashamed to say so, just because they never dare trust their own judgment.—­But it is good, Warburton; uncommonly good.  If there’s a weak point, it’s doggy; I can’t come the Landseer.  Still, you can see it’s meant for a doggy, eh?”

“I guessed it,” replied Will, warming his hands.

“Lady Caroline is superb,” went on Franks, standing before the canvas, head aside and hands m his pocket.  “This is my specialty, old boy—­lovely woman made yet lovelier, without loss of likeness.  She’ll be the fury of the next Academy.—­See that something in the eyes, Warburton?  Don’t know how to call it.  My enemies call it claptrap.  But they can’t do the trick, my boy, they can’t do it.  They’d give the end of their noses if they could.”

He laughed gaily, boyishly.  How well he was looking!  Warburton, having glanced at him, smiled with a surly kindness.

“All your doing, you know,” pursued Franks, who had caught the look and the smile.  “You’ve made me.  But for you I should have gone to the devil.  I was saying so yesterday to the Crosses.”

“The Crosses?”

Will had sharply turned his head, with a curious surprise.

“Don’t you remember the Crosses?” said Franks, smiling with a certain embarrassment, “Rosamund’s friends at Walham Green.  I met them by chance not long ago, and they wanted me to go and see them.  The old lady’s a bore, but she can be agreeable when she likes; the girl’s rather clever—­does pictures for children’s books, you know.  She seems to be getting on better lately.  But they are wretchedly poor.  I was saying to them—­oh, but that reminds me of something else.  You haven’t seen the Pomfrets lately?”

“No.”

“Then you don’t know that Mr. Elvan’s dead?”

“No.”

“He died a month ago, over there in the South of France.  Rosamund has gone back to Egypt, to stay with that friend of hers at Cairo.  Mrs. Pomfret hints to me that the girls will have to find a way of earning their living; Elvan has left practically nothing.  I wonder whether—­”

He smiled and broke off.

“Whether what?” asked the listener.

“Oh, nothing.  What’s the time?”

“Whether what?” repeated Warburton, savagely.