admirable qualities in a portrait-painter who desires to succeed.



CHAPTER III


It was to one of his sitters that Lightmark owed his introduction to
the Sylvesters. Charles Sylvester had been told that Lightmark was a
man who would certainly achieve greatness, and he felt that here was
an opportunity to add all hitherto missing leaf to his laurels, by
constituting himself a patron of art, a position not often attained
by young barristers even when, as in Sylvester's case, they have
already designs upon a snug constituency.

Sylvester began by giving his _protégé_ a commission to paint his
mother's portrait, and before this work was finished a very
appreciable degree of intimacy had sprung up between the Sylvester
family and the young painter, who found no difficulty in gratifying
a woman-of-the-world's passion for small-talk and fashionable
intelligence--judiciously culled from the columns of the daily
newspapers with the art of a practised wielder of the scissors and
paste-brush.

With Miss Sylvester he had a less easy task. She was a girl who had
from a very early age been accustomed to have her impressions
moulded by her self-assertive elder brother; and he, at any rate at
first, had been careful to show that he regarded Lightmark as an
object of his patronage rather than as a friend who could meet him
on his own exalted level. He had been known, in his earlier years,