treasures in a high and exclusive manner, and made a big annual income, fifteen hundred pounds of which Chetwynd enjoyed as a salary; and he had perquisites, besides an unique position in artist society. His wife was a bright, buxom, clever woman of the world, a Londoner with all a Londoner's prejudices, and they had a family of half a dozen children, and lived in good style in Dorset-square, where they had a music room and an art gallery at the rent of two hundred a year, which in the more fashionable regions of Kensington would have been worth five or six.
CHAPTER XV.
"THAT WOMAN'S FACE."
"And you think you interpret the subject in this sketch of a company of prisoners on the way to Siberia?" asked Chetwynd, once more forcing the conversation in the direction of Philip's work.
"Yes, I cannot imagine anything more tragic, can you?"
"I could think of many subjects more poetically tragic," said Chetwynd, "but none which in your hands will make a more remarkable picture."
"An Irish eviction?" said Philip, smiling, not sarcastically, but recalling a discussion in which Chetwynd had considered it necessary to dwell upon certain cruelties of eviction in order to keep Philip up to what he considered the right pitch of democratic sentiment — for Dick was more Radical than Rebel, more Reformer than Republican; and in all this he was one of the anomalies of English political life in these days of political evolution and change.
"No, not an eviction, Mr. Cynic," said Dick; "don't think I am blind to the due proportions of things, and I
