The four years that passed before Gwen Howard-Russell and Lothrop Audouin returned to Rome, were years of bright promise and quick performance for Cohn Churchill. He hadn\'t been eighteen months with Maradiano, when the master took him aside one day and said to him kindly, \'My friend, you will only waste your time by studying with me any longer. You must take a studio on your own account, and begin earning a little money.\'

\'But where can I get one?\' Colin asked.

\'There is one vacant five doors off,\' Maragliano answered. \'I have been to see it, and you can have it for very little. It\'s so near, that I can drop in from time to time and assist you with my advice and experience. But indeed, Churchill, you need either very little; for I fear the time is soon coming when the pupil is to excel the master.\'

\'If I thought that, master,\' Cohn replied smilingly, \'I should stop here for ever. But as I know I can never hope to rival you, I shall take the studio, and tempt fortune.\'

It was one morning during the next winter that Cohn was hard at work upon his clay group of Autumn borne by the Breezes, then nearly completed, when the door of the new studio opened suddenly, and a plain, farmer-looking old man in a tweed suit, entered unannounced.

\'Good morning, Mr. Churchill,\' he said, in a voice of infinite condescension. \'My niece sent me here to look at your statues, you know. You\'ve got some very pretty things here, really. Some very pretty things indeed, as Gwen told me.\'

\'Oh, I see,\' Colin answered, with a smile of recognition. \'It was Miss Howard-Russell, then, who told you where to find me.\'

\'Well, not exactly,\' the visitor went on, peering at the Autumn with a look of the intensest critical interest; \'she told me I should find you at the studio of a man of the name of Miaragliano—or something—I think she called him. Well, I went there, ferreted out the place, and found a fuzzy-headed foreigner Italian fellow, all plastered over with mud and rubbish, who spoke the most ridiculous broken English; and he told me you\'d moved to these new quarters. So I came on here to look you up and give you a commission, you know—I think you call it. My niece—she\'s really a first cousin once removed, or something equally abstruse, I fancy—but I always speak of her as my niece for short, because she\'s a good deal younger than I am, and I stand to her in loco avunculi; in loco avunculi, Mr. Churchill. Well, she positively insisted upon it that I must come and give you a commission.\'

\'It was very good of her, I\'m sure,\' Colin answered, his heart fluttering somewhat; for this was positively his first nibble. \'May I ask if you are also a Mr. Howard-Russell?\'

The visitor drew himself up to his utmost height with much dignity, as though he felt surprised to think that Colin could for a single moment have imagined him to be nothing more on earth than a plain Mister. \'No,\' he said, in a chilly voice; \'I fancied my niece had mentioned my name to you. I am Lord Beaminster.\'

Colin bowed his head slightly. He wasn\'t much used to earls and viscounts in those days, though he grew afterwards to understand the habits and manners of the species with great accuracy; but he felt that after all the Earl of Beaminster, mighty magnate and land-owner as he was, didn\'t really differ very conspicuously in outer appearance from any other respectable fox-hunting country gentleman. Except that, perhaps, he looked, if anything, a trifle stupider than the average.

The earl considerately left Colin a minute or so to accustom himself to the shock of suddenly mixing in such exalted society, and then he said again, narrowly observing the Autumn, \'Some very pretty things, indeed, I must admit. Now, what do you call this one? A capital group. I\'ve half a mind to commission it.\'

\'That\'s Autumn borne by the Breezes,\' Colin answered, gazing up at it for the thousandth time with a loving attention. \'My idea was to represent Autumn as a beautiful youth, scattering leaves with his two hands, and upheld by the wild west wind—“the breath of autumn\'s being,” as Shelley calls it.\'

\'Quite so,\' the earl said, assuming once more a studied critical attitude; \'but I don\'t see the leaves, you know—I don\'t see the leaves, Mr. Churchill.\'

\'It would be impossible, of course,\' Colin replied, \'to represent any of the leaves as falling through the air unsupported; and so I didn\'t care to put any in Autumn\'s hands, even, preferring to trust so much to the imagination of the spectator. In art it\'s a well-known canon that one ought, in fact, always to leave something to the imagination.\'

\'But might I suggest,\' Lord Beaminster said, putting his head a little on one side, and surveying the figure with profound gravity, \'that you might easily support the falling leaves by an imperceptible wire passing neatly through a small drilled eye into the legs of the Breezes.\'

Colin smiled. \'I don\'t think,\' he said, \'that that would be a very artistic mode of treatment.\'

\'Indeed,\' the earl answered with some hesitation \'Well, I\'m surprised to hear you say that, now; for my father, who was always considered a man of very remarkable taste, and a great patron of art and artists, had a Triton constructed for our carp-pond at Netherton, blowing a spout of water, in marble, from his trumpet, and the falling drops, where the spout broke into spray, were all secured by wires in the way I mention. Still, of course,\' this with a deferential air of mock-modesty, \'I couldn\'t dream of pitting my opinion—a mere outsider\'s opinion—against yours in such a matter. But couldn\'t you at least make the leaves tumble in a sort of spire, you know, reaching to the ground; touching one another, of course, so as to form a connected column, which would give support to the right arm, now so very extended and aerial-looking.\'

\'Why,\' Colin answered, beginning to fancy that perhaps even admission to the British peerage didn\'t naturally constitute a man a great art-critic, \'I don\'t think marble\'s a good medium in any case for representing anything so thin and delicate as falling leaves; and though of course a clever sculptor might choose to make the attempt, by way of showing his skill in overcoming a technical difficulty, for my part I look upon such mere mechanical tours de force as really unworthy of a true artist. Obedience to one\'s material rather than defiance of it is the thing to be aimed at. And, to tell you the truth, the pose of that right arm that you so much object to is the very point in the whole group that I most pride myself upon. Maragliano says it\'s a very fine and original conception.\'

The earl stared at him intently for two seconds, in blank astonishment. What a very-extraordinary and conceited young fellow, really! The idea of his thus contradicting him, the Earl of Beaminster, in every particular! Still, Gwen had specially desired him to buy something from this man Churchill, and had said that he was going to become a very great and distinguished sculptor. For Gwen\'s sake, he would try to befriend the young man, and take no notice of his extraordinary rudeness.

\'Well,\' he said slowly, after a long pause,

\'I won\'t quarrel with you over the details. I should like to have that group in marble, and if you\'ll allow me, I\'ll commission it. Only, as we don\'t agree about the pose of the Autumn, I\'ll tell you what we\'ll do, Mr. Churchill; we\'ll compromise the matter. Suppose you remove the figure altogether, and put a clock-dial in its place. Then it\'d do splendidly, you see, for the top of the marble mantelpiece at Netherton Priory.\'

Colin leant back against the parapet of the wainscot in blank dismay. What on earth was he to say to this terrible Goth of a Lord Beaminster? He wanted a first commission, badly enough, in all conscience, but how could he possibly consent to throw away the labour of so many days, and to destroy the beauty of that exquisite group by putting a dial in the place of Autumn. The idea was plainly too ridiculous. It was sacrilege, it was crime, it was sheer blasphemy against the divinity of beauty. \'I\'m very sorry, Lord Beaminster,\' he said, at last, regretfully. \'I should much have liked to execute the group for you in marble; but I really can\'t consent to sacrifice the Autumn. It\'s the central figure and inspiring idea of the entire composition. If you take it at all, I think you ought to take it exactly as the sculptor himself has first designed it. An artist, you know, gives much time and thought to what he is working upon. Be it merely the particular turn or twist of the bit of drapery he is just then modelling, his whole soul for that one day is all fixed and centred upon that single feature. The purchaser ought to remember that, and oughtn\'t to alter on a moment\'s hasty consideration what has cost the artist whole weeks and months of patient thought and arduous labour. And yet, I\'m sorry not to perform my first work in marble for you; for I\'m a West Dorset man myself by birth and training, and I should have liked well to see my “Autumn and the Breezes” standing, where it ought to stand, in one of the big oriel windows of Nether ton Priory.\' That last touch of unconscious and unintentional flattery just suc............