When Laurie Renton arrived in town, he went with the story of his family’s fortune and his own, as was natural, to the padrona, who had now a double interest in the tale. She had already heard of it in a letter from Alice; but such a narrative is naturally more full and satisfactory by word of mouth.

It was in the same house, up the same stairs, in the same studio, that Laurie sought his friend. Everything was seven years older, and the hair growing thin on the top of Laurie’s head, and Alice the mother of children; but neither Mrs. Severn nor her studio was much changed. She had attained, when we saw her first, to that table-land which lies in the centre of an innocent and healthful life, and on which Time, if he does not stand still, moves with such equal and steady steps, that it is difficult to trace his progress; and as many more years were probably before her ere there would appear in the padrona any such marked signs of the passage of years as those which had already left their stamp on Laurie in his youth.{v.3-284} There might be a few white threads among her hair, at least she said there were; but for all that any one could have told, she might have been wrapped in some enchanted sleep for all those years, instead of working, and thinking, and sorrowing, and taking such simple pleasures as came to her. The pleasures had been less and the sorrows greater since Alice left her; but now Edie had grown, as everybody said, a great girl, and the mother’s heart was stirring into life in her development, to prepare for herself another crisis and sacrifice. It was years now since Laurie had returned from his first self-banishment to Italy. He had come back and he had been away again from time to time, but he had always returned here,—‘home’ as he liked to call it,—and for a long period there had been nothing in the character of his feelings which made it painful to him to come. How this was he could not tell. When he went away on that forlorn journey to Rome he had felt as if he never could look again upon the woman whom he loved with all his heart, but who, as nature herself indicated, could never be more to him than a friend. She could not be his,—never,—though everything in heaven and earth were to plead for him,—and the only thing for him to do was to rush away from her, and bury himself and his unhappy love out of sight for ever. These had been his feelings when he went away;—but, somehow, they did not last. Slowly, by degrees, he and his heart came back to her without any an{v.3-285}guish or despair in them. When he returned, and went half-tremblingly to see if he could bear the sight of her, Laurie found, somewhat to his astonishment, that the sight, instead of driving him wild with disappointed affection, soothed and consoled and softened him as nothing else could do. Perhaps, had it been possible that she should become any other man’s wife the sensation would have been different; but there had long ago ceased to be any strong wish on the matter in Laurie’s mind. The old custom of hanging about her house came back upon him. He would come and talk to her of all his own concerns, and of a great many of hers, by the hour together; and not of realities only, but of fancies,—everything that came into his head. There was the strangest transposition of ordinary rules in their intercourse. While he lounged about, and talked and poured out all his mind, she would be working on steadily, pausing to note her effects,—now and then calling him into counsel on some knotty point, responding to his thoughts, understanding him even when he but half-uttered his meaning, giving him a certain proof of perfect sympathy and friendship, more soft and tender than ordinary friendship,—and yet never stopping in her work. Had they been of the same age, such a thing of course could not have been possible; but on the vantage-ground of a dozen additional years the woman stood calm and steadfast, and the man too, his boyish fit of passion over, was calm. No doubt{v.3-286} there was a whisper at one time in the artists’ quarter that Mrs. Severn was going to make a fool of herself and marry a man young enough to be her son. But as time disproved that matter, the world, which after all is not such a stupid world, but acknowledges, after due probation, the privileges that can be safely accorded to the blameless, held its tongue,—or only jeered innocently by times at the friendship. ‘Such things are impracticable generally, and dangerous, you know, and all that. It is all very well to talk of friendship; but one knows it always falls into love on one side or the other. I really do believe an exception ought to be made for the padrona and Laurie Renton,’ was what was said in Fitzroy Square. And as the two took matters with perfect composure, and never looked as if they supposed either the world or the Square to have anything to do with it, the unusual bond between them soon came to be considered a matter of course. It was not such a bond that the man was always at the woman’s apron-strings. He went away, sometimes for months together, and travelled about in that half-professional, half-dilettante way that suited Laurie; and then he wrote to her, and next after Alice’s, Laurie’s letters were looked for in Mrs. Severn’s house. And I will not say that there was not now and then just a word in them which the padrona passed over when she read these epistles to the boys, and which made her half smile, half sigh with a curious mingled sense of regret,{v.3-287} and amusement, and pleasure. He would say, when he was describing something to her, ‘If you were but here, padrona mia, I should want no more.’ Foolish fellow! as if she ever could be with him, as if it would not be the height of folly and weakness, and overturn of the whole rational world and all the modesties of nature. But yet, so long as it evaporated in a harmless sigh like this, it hurt no one,—not Laurie, who perhaps loved his wanderings all the better for that soft want in them; and not her, as she doubled down the page at that point with a half-laugh. And when he came home the first place he went to was the Square. To be sure, such a friendship put all thoughts of marrying out of Laurie’s head, as Mrs. Suffolk, who thought everybody should marry, sometimes deplored. ‘Unless you send him away, padrona, he will always be just as he is. He will never think of any other kind of life,’ she would say to her friend. ‘My dear, he has no money to marry on,’ the padrona would say,—and so Laurie’s heart had always found a home and every kind of support and consolation and sympathy in Fitzroy Square.

And, to tell the truth, the money had been rather a difficult point with him now and then. To live upon two hundred a-year when you have been brought up a Renton of Renton, is a matter which requires a great deal of consideration. But Laurie, fortunately for himself, had no expensive tastes, and{v.3-288} he painted some pictures, and, what was more remarkable, sold some; and even found himself on the line at the Academy, thus carrying out his highest dreams. But it did not give him the gratification, nor cause the stir he had once anticipated. It was a small picture, a little bit of Italian air and sunshine, and Slasher gave it a little paragraph all to itself in the ‘Sword;’ but the people whom he had once pictured to himself finding out his name in the catalogue, and calling heaven and earth to witness that Laurie Renton had done something at last, had by this time forgotten all about Laurie Renton, or he had forgotten them, which came to the same thing. And candidly in his soul, Laurie allowed, that had not old Welby been on the hanging committee, probably it never would have reached ‘the line;’ and had not Slasher been a friend of his, would never have been noticed in the ‘Sword.’ But it sold for a hundred pounds, which was always an advantage. The picture was called ‘Feliciello, on Tiberio,’ and was the picture of a dark-faced Capriote guide, on one of the highest points of his island, pointing out to a fair English girl the points in the wonderful landscape round. It was Edie Severn, who had never been there, with her golden hair streaming round her, who was the English girl. But handsome Feliciello had been studied on the spot. And Mr. Rich of Richmont,—always a great patron of the fine arts,—gave Laurie a hundred pounds for it, and thought it one of his greatest bargains. ‘This pic{v.3-289}ture has a story,’ he would say to his guests; ‘it was painted by a gentleman, the son of one of my neighbours in the country, a man who had never been brought up to make his living by art. It is quite a romance; but I hear matters are settled, and that he has come into his share of the money, and will paint no more, and I think I was very lucky to secure this. My daughter, Lady Horsman, will tell you all about it.’ ‘About the picture painted by a gentleman?’ Nelly would say, on being questioned. ‘Most painters that I know are gentlemen. Papa means to infer that he is not much of a painter, I suppose.’ For Lady Horsman was not fond of the Rentons, and had never cared to cultivate their society. ‘If you get my lady on painters she’ll talk till midnight,’ Sir George said out of his moustache. He did not know the difference between a sign-post and a Titian, and thought the one quite as pretty as the other; but he was the head of one of the oldest families in Christendom, and Master of the Hounds in his county, and a great many other grandeurs; and, so far as I know, Nelly had the full value for her fifty thousand pounds.

This, however, is a digression a long way out of Fitzroy Square. Laurie went to the padrona with his story, and found her still in a state of excitement over Alice’s letter,—the second since the event,—with something in it about Dovecote, which was the last new possibility. She had just been taken to see{v.3-290} it, and her letter was full of an enthusiastic description of its beauties. ‘Think, mamma, of a lovely little house close to Renton, with a lawn sloping to the river, and a cow, and a pony-carriage, and I don’t know what,’ the young wife wrote in her delight. ‘And Frank thinks he may afford himself a hunter, and there is the sweetest honeysuckle room for Edie and you!’ The padrona, being mother to the being upon whom this glorious prospect was opening, was more interested at first in the Dovecote than in anything Laurie had to say.

‘To think one has only to take the train and be with her in an hour,—after being so far away for,—a lifetime!’ the padrona said, with tears in her eyes.

‘Only six years,’ said Laurie; ‘but never mind; after Alice has had her turn perhaps you will think of me.’

‘When you know I always think of you!’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘it becomes you to be exigeant, Laurie! and you are not going to have a cow, and a pony-carriage, and everything that is most delightful on the face of the earth. Think of Alice having a cow! You are so terribly blasé, it does not seem to strike you. And Edie is out, the child, so that there is no one to be glad but me.’

‘It does not strike me at all,’ said Laurie. ‘If she had a dozen cows, I think I could bear it. But some day I must take you to see Dovecote, padrona, since you like it so much.{v.3-291}’

‘I wish they had had Feliciello,’ said Mrs. Severn, ‘if one had known you were all to be so well off,—it would have pleased Frank.’

‘Frank will like some of those vile chromos just as well,’ said Laurie. ‘I’ll buy him a few, I think. And I mean to bring Ben to see you to-night; then you will know us all. Not that there will be any intense gratification in that; but you’ll like Ben. He is made of different stuff from the rest of us. There is more in him. He is not so cheeky as Frank; and he is another sort of fellow, to be sure, from a good-for-nothing like me.’

‘Laurie, there is something the matter,’ said the padrona, turning upon him with her palette in her hand. She knew all his tones like the notes in music, and heard the far-off quiver of one of his fits of despondency already vibrating in the quiet. ‘Is not this as good for you as for the rest?’

‘Oh, yes, quite as good,’ he said abruptly, with his eyes on her work. ‘You are putting too much yellow in that light.’

‘Am I? but that is not the question. Laurie, never mind the light, but tell me what is wrong.’

‘I must mind the light,’ he said. ‘If I can’t put you right when you get into a mess, what is the good of me? It’s all wrong and it’s all right, padrona mia, and I don’t know that it matters much one way or another; but I don’t quite like your shadows. With that tone of light they should have more blue in{v.3-292} them,’ he went on, gazing at the picture and shading his eyes with his hand.

‘But it will make a great difference in your life,’ said Mrs. Severn, putting down her tools and drawing a chair near to where he sat.

‘That is just it,’ he said; ‘it will make no difference to speak of. It is a great thing for Ben; and for Frank, too, it will be everything. You can see that clearly. But what difference will it make to me? More money to spend, perhaps, and better rooms to live in; but no sort of expansion or widening-out of life. That’s not possible, you know. It was put a stop to once, and no change that I know of can effect it now.’

‘You cannot mean to reproach me, Laurie?’ said the padrona.

‘No,’ he said, still fixedly gazing at the picture; ‘I don’t reproach you. Being you, perhaps you could have done nothing else. I am not complaining of anybody; but this is how it is,—you see it for yourself.’

‘Laurie, listen to me,’ she said, with eagerness, laying her hand on his arm. ‘I have wanted to speak to you for long, and never liked to begin the subject. You must make an effort to break this spell. I did not say a word as long as you were poor,—for what could you do?—and I thought I was always some consolation to you; but now that you have money enough, and can make a new beginning,—Laurie, do{v.3-293} you know, I think it would be better for you to go away from me.’

‘What, go away again?’ he said, with a half-smile, ‘as I did when I went to Rome? No, there is no such occasion now.’

‘Of course there is no such occasion now,—............