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young lady, and listen to me.

a rage."

Don't go away in

"I will hear no more," said Marion. "Find some one else to work your cheats for you."

"You will come back, young lady-you will come back. You will get no one to give you such a goot price for your bictures as Gottfried Hermann; you will come then, and work with my young men, and make pewtiful Eddys and Leighdons and Linnells. Oh, yes; you will come back in a liddle time; you will come back to your friend, and I bear you no malice, my tear young lady-no malice at all. I like you for it; I do indeed. Good-bye, Miss Reffel. Oh," he cried, as she left the room, "do baint your sister for me in oils; baint her as Cotifa, and I will gif you ten pounds. I will indeedten pounds, mein Gott-ten pounds! How pewtiful she would look as Cotifa!"

M

CHAPTER VII.

ARION was more than outraged by the proposals of this unholy alien, this German producer of new and

original pictures - she was humiliated. If you want to humiliate your enemy beyond endurance, ask him to do something which shows the very small respect in which you hold him. To the frailer vessels of humanity, indeed those of ornamented porcelain and coloured glass-it is worse to be asked to do things dishonourable than it is actually to do them. Men who negotiate foreign loans, men who bull and bear the stock market, men who promote bubble companies, 'salt' mines, draw up prospectuses, advertise sherry, send ships to sea that are bound to sink, direct bankrupt life insurance associations, 'adapt' plays, and abuse

their rivals in anonymous criticism,-all these can bear their heads proudly, and believe themselves honourable and upright men. Ask them confidentially to join in cracking a crib, fencing a wipe, or any of the humbler and less remunerative forms of treachery, and lo! their self-respect collapses like a pricked balloon. For a discreditable proposal implies discredit. Marion had borne a great deal without repining. She worked all day for a miserable pittance; she saw others reap the fruits of her labours: this was all part of the condition of poverty; it did not make her seriously unhappy. Never before this had she been asked to join in fraud; never before this had the sweet waters of Hope in her heart been troubled by such a prophecy as Mr. Hermann's, that she would come back soon, poorer than ever, and be glad to take his

offer.

Should she ever go back so ruined and lost as to accept the foul proposal? Were there, then, such depths of misery as would drive the unfortunate to give up even the semblance of honour? Was it hopeless to struggle with the world? And were all the avenues barred by the middle

man, to rob and plunder those who must sell or starve?

Alas, how many have given an answer! Ask of the middle-man, if he will tell you. Look behind the curtain, the kindly veil which hides the dreadful features of truth. See at their toil the slaves of those who take the work and sell it, and grow fat upon the proceeds. There are such fat and noisome grubs in literature, but it is in art that they chiefly flourish. They starve the struggling artist into submission; they cheat and plunder him; they lie to him, and steal from him; and when his last spark of ambition is extinct, they make him the instrument of their forgeries. It is no fiction, but a miserable truth, that Gottfried Hermann exists and drives a roaring trade, keeping in his pay the men who have been starved and cheated by Burls. The middle-man bars all the avenues.

For the moment, Marion felt as if she was in the bonds of a stern necessity which was dragging her downwards, and there seemed no escape. It was in vain that she fought against the feeling. It seemed that the man spoke truly of coming events. She would have to go

back and humbly ask for work-work of any kind, in order that she and hers might eat a morsel of bread. And there came upon her brain, for a while, the black pall of despair, when the mind is shrouded with darkness that can be felt; when the distinction between good and evil, for which Adam gave up Paradise, is lost again, and the earth seems to be hell; when there is no more hope, and the voice of God is silent.

She would have to go back. She shuddered at thinking of his soft and flabby face, his fat white hands, his oily voice. It came upon her quite suddenly what he meant by asking her to paint her sister for him-girls do not understand these things at first. The thought was like a shower bath. She shook herself together, and dared once more to resolve. Never, come what might-poverty, disappointment, distress-never would she go back to that man again.

She had wandered, wrapped in her gloomy thoughts, as far as the Horse Guards, when this sudden rage seized her. She crossed the road, and went into St. James's Park. The sun was shining—it had been shining in the streets, in

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