Mr. Audouin,\' Hiram cried, bursting into his friend\'s rooms in a fever of despair, three days later, \'I\'ve come to tell you I\'m going back to America!\'

\'Back to America, Hiram!\' Audouin cried in dismay, for he guessed the cause instinctively at once. \'Why, what on earth do you want to do that for?\'

Hiram flung himself back in moody dejection on the ottoman in the corner. \'Why,\' he said, \'do you know who has been to see me? Mr. Truman.\'

\'Well, Hiram?\' Audouin murmured, trembling.

\'Well, he tells me I\'ve made a complete mistake of it. I\'m not a painter, I can\'t be a painter, and I never could possibly make a painter. Oh, Mr. Audouin, Mr. Audouin, I knew it myself long ago, but till this very week I\'ve hoped against hope, and never ventured fully to realise it. But I know now he tells the truth. I can\'t paint, I tell you, I can\'t paint—no, not that much!\' And he snapped his fingers bitterly in his utter humiliation.

Audouin drew a chair over softly to his friend\'s side, and laid his hand with womanly tenderness upon the listless arm. \'Hiram,\' he said in a tone of deep self-reproach, \'it\'s all my fault; my fault, and mine only. I am to blame for all this. I wanted to help and direct and encourage you; and in the end, I\'ve only succeeded in making both of us supremely miserable!\'

\'Oh, no,\' Hiram cried, taking Audouin\'s hand warmly in his own, \'not your fault, dear Mr. Audouin, not your fault, nor mine, but nature\'s. You thought there was more in me than there actually was—that was kindly and friendly and well-meant of you. You fancied you had found an artistic genius, an oasis in the sandy desert of Geauga County, and you wanted to develop and assist him. It was generous and noble of you; if you were misled, it was your own sympathetic, appreciative, disinterested nature that misled you. You were too enthusiastic. You always thought better of me than I have ever thought of myself; but if that\'s a fault, it\'s a fault on the nobler side, surely. No, no, nobody is to blame for this but myself, my own feeble self, that cannot rise, whatever I may do, to the difficult heights you would have me fly to.\' Audouin looked at him long and silently. In his own heart, he had begun to feel that Hiram\'s heroic figure-painting had turned out a distinct failure For that figure-painting he, Lotlirop Audouin, was alone responsible. But, even in spite of the great name of Truman urged against him, he could hardly believe that Hiram would not yet succeed in landscape. \'Did Truman see the Tyrolese sketches?\' he asked anxiously at last.

\'Yes, he did, Mr. Audouin.\'

\'And what did he say about them?\'

\'Simply that he thought I ought never to have come away from America.\'

Audouin drew a long breath. \'This is very serious, Hiram,\' he said slowly. \'I apprehend certainly that this is very serious. Truman\'s opinion is worth a great deal; but, after all, it isn\'t everything. I\'ve led you wrong so long and so often, my poor boy, that I\'m almost afraid to advise you any farther; and yet, do you know, I can\'t help somehow believing that you will really do great things yet in landscape.\'

\'Never, never,\' Hiram answered firmly.

\'I shall never do anything better than the edge of the lake at Chattawauga!\'

\'But you have done great things, Hiram,\' Audouin cried, warming up with generous enthusiasm, just in proportion as his protégés spirits sank lower and lower. \'My dear fellow, you have done great things already. I\'ll stake my reputation upon it, Hiram, that the lake shore at Chattawauga\'s a piece of painting that\'ll even yet live and be famous.\' Hiram shook his head gloomily. \'No, no,\' he said; \'I mean to take Mr. Truman\'s advice, and go back to hoe corn and plant potatoes in Muddy Creek Valley. That\'s just about what I\'m fit for.\'

\'But, Hiram,\' his friend said, coming closer and closer to him, \'you mustn\'t dream of doing that. In justice to me you really mustn\'t. I\'ve misled you and wasted your time, I know, by inducing you to go in for this wretched figure-painting. It doesn\'t suit you and your idiosyncrasy: that I see now quite clearly. All my life long it\'s been a favourite doctrine of mine, my boy, that the only true way of salvation lies in perfect fidelity to one\'s own inner promptings. And how have I carried out that gospel of mine in your case? Why, by absurdly inducing you to neglect the line you naturally excel in, and to take up with a line that you don\'t personally care a pin for. Now, dear Hiram, my dear, good fellow, don\'t go and punish me for this by returning in a huff\' to Geauga County. Have pity upon me, and spare me this misery, this degradation. I\'ve suffered much already, though you never knew it, about this false direction I\'ve tried to give your genius (for you have genius, I\'m sure you have ): I\'ve lain awake night after night and reproached myself for it bitterly: don\'t go now and put me to shame by making my mistake destroy your whole future career and chances as a painter. It need cost you nothing to remain. I misled you by getting you to paint those historical subjects. I see they were a mistake now, and I will buy the whole of them from you at your own valuation. That will be only just, for it was for me really that you originally painted them. Do, do please reconsider this hasty decision.\' Hiram rocked himself to and fro piteously upon the ottoman, but only answered, \'Impossible, impossible. You are too kind, too generous.\'

Audouin looked once more at his dejected dispirited face, and then, pausing a minute or two, said quietly and solemnly, \'And how about Gwen, Hiram?\'

Hiram started up in surprise and discomfiture, and asked hastily, \'Why, what on earth do you know about Gwen—about Miss Russell, I mean—Mr. Audouin?\'

\'I can\'t tell you how I\'ve surprised your secret, Hiram,\' Audouin said, his voice trembling a little as he spoke: \'perhaps some day I may tell you, and perhaps never. But I\'ve found it all out, and I ask you, my boy, for Gwen\'s sake—for Miss Russell\'s sake—to wait awhile before returning so rashly to America. Hiram, you owe it as a duty to her not to run away from her, and fame and fortune, at the first failure.\'

Hiram flung himself down upon the ottoman again in a frenzy of despondency. \'That\'s just why I think I must go at once, Mr. Audouin,\' he cried, in his agony. \'I only know two alternatives. One is America; the other is the Tiber.\'

\'Hiram, Hiram!\' his friend said soothingly. \'Yes, yes, Mr. Audouin, I know all that, I know what you want to say to me. But I can\'t drag down Gwen—born and brought up as she has been—I can\'t drag her down with me to a struggling painter\'s pot-boiling squalidness. I can\'t do it, and I won\'t do it, and I oughtn\'t to do it; and the kindest thing for her sake, and for all our sakes, would be for me to get out of it all at once and altogether.\'

\'Then you will go, Hiram?\'

\'Yes, I will go, Mr. Audouin, by the very next Trieste steamer.\'

He rose slowly from the ottoman, shook his friend\'s hand in silence, and went away without another word. Audouin saw by his manner that he really meant it, and he sat down wondering what good he could do to countervail this great unintentional evil he had done to Hiram.

\'Lothrop Audouin,\' he said to himself harshly, \'a pretty mess you have made now of your own life and of Hiram Winthrop\'s! Is this your perfect fidelity to the inner promptings—this your obedience to the unspoken voice of the divine human consciousness? You poor, purblind, affected, silly, weak, useless creature, I hate you, I hate you. Go, now, see what you can do to render happy these two better lives that you have done your best to ruin for ever.\'

If any other man had used such words of Lothrop Audouin, he would have shown himself a bitter, foolish, short-sighted cynic. But as Lothrop Audouin said it himself, of course he had a full right to his own opinion.

Yet some men, not wholly bad men either, might have rejoiced at the thought that they would thus get rid of a successful rival. They would have said to themselves, \'When Hiram is gone, Gwen will soon forget him, and then I may have a chance at least of finally winning her favour.\' In this belief, they would have urged Hiram, in a halfhearted way only, not to return to America; and if afterwards he persisted in ............