II. — THE CRIMSON STREAK

First published in Pearson's Magazine, London, August 1898

I.

THE great painter stood out from the rest of his guests like a flash of sunlight on the dense blackness of a pine forest. He had ever been a man whose rod swallows all the rest. A placid smile played about the clean-shaven, sensitive mouth. Prince of painters and courtiers alike, Lord Falconridge was a personage: he was an onyx pillar supporting the cerulean canopy of Society.

Falconridge's conviction that he himself was an institution gave an added charm to his fascinating personality. No god can nod more charmingly than Jupiter. And here was the Jove of modern painters, gifted, imaginative, with a pencil that drew and fascinated immensely withal.

Favoured mortals who had the entrée to Kensington House Terrace would have found it difficult to describe Falconridge's lordly pleasure house there. They could babble incontinently of Corinthian capitals, marble halls, and flashing fountains. As to the rest it was too harmonious for any single object to fix the retina. Visitors carried away with them a pleased memory of marble and an atmosphere of scarlet, toned with the tender greens of palms and lemon trees.

That dash of crimson vividness appeared to be the keynote of Falconridge's life. It formed part of his individuality. No picture of his was complete without it, the loose Byronic knot at his throat was always of red silk.

"Dost like the picture?" Falconridge quoted gaily. He stood at the top of the great studio, a noble and stately figure in evening dress, rendered all the more striking by the embroidered velvet coat he wore in lieu of the claw-hammer garment of conventionality. An air of romance like a faint perfume clung to that coat. Falconridge had had his affairs, both great and small, and as to the jacket in question, like Prince Arthur's kerchief, a"princess wrought it him." The rest of the story matters little, but the coat was as well known as a certain statesman's orchid.

No