It's the last he painted, you know," Mrs. Gisburn said with pardonable pride. "The last but one," she corrected herself-"but the other doesn't count, because he destroyed it."
"Destroyed it?" I was about to follow up this clue when I heard a footstep and saw Jack himself on the threshold.
As he stood there, his hands in the pockets of his velveteen coat, the thin brown waves of hair pushed back from his white forehead, his lean sunburnt cheeks furrowed by a smile that lifted the tips of a self-confident moustache, I felt to what a degree he had the same quality as his pictures -- the quality of looking cleverer than he was.
His wife glanced at him deprecatingly, but his eyes travelled past her to the portrait.
"Mr. Rickham wanted to see it," she began, as if excusing herself. He shrugged his shoulders, still smiling.
"Oh, Rickham found me out long ago," he said lightly; then, passing his arm through mine: "Come and see the rest of the house."
He showed it to me with a kind of naive suburban pride: the bath-rooms, the speaking-tubes, the dress-closets, the trouserpresses -- all the complex simplifications of the millionaire's domestic economy. And whenever my wonder paid the expected tribute he said, throwing out his chest a little: "Yes, I really don't see how people manage to live without that."
Well -- it was just the end one might have foreseen for him. Only he was, through it all and in spite of it all -- as he had been through, and in spite of, his pictures -- so handsome, so charming, so disarming, that one longed to cry out: "Be dissatisfied with your leisure!" as once one had longed to say: "Be dissatisfied with your work!"
But, with the cry on my lips, my diagnosis suffered an unexpected check.
"This is my own lair," he said, leading me into a dark plain room at the end of the florid vista. It was square and brown and leathery: no "effects"; no bric-a-brac, none of the air of posing for reproduction in a picture weekly -- above all, no least sign of ever having been used as a studio.
The fact brought home to me the absolute finality of Jack's break with his old life.
"Don't you ever dabble with paint any more?" I asked, still looking about for a trace of such activity.
"Never," he said briefly.
"Or water-colour -- or etching?"
His confident eyes grew dim, and his cheeks paled a little under their handsome sunburn.
"Never think of it, my dear fellow -- any more than if I'd never touched a brush."
And his tone told me in a flash that he never thought of anything else.
I moved away, instinctively embarrassed by my unexpected discovery; and as I turned, my eye fell on a small picture above the mantel-piece -- the only object breaking the plain oak panelling of the room.
"Oh, by Jove!" I said.
It was a sketch of a donkey -- an old tired donkey, standing in the rain under a wall.
"By Jove -- a Stroud!" I cried.
He was silent; but I felt him close behind me, breathing a little quickly.
