21--10 o'clock.' His mood collapsed.

He sat down by the dying fire, brooding and miserable.

How on earth was he going to get through the next few weeks?
Abominable!--thoughtlessly cruel!--that neither Lord Findon nor Madame de Pastourelles should ever yet have spoken to him of money! These months of work on the portrait--this constant assumption on the part of the Findon circle that both the portrait and the 'Genius Loci' were to become Findon possessions--and yet no sum named--no clear agreement even--nothing, as it seemed to Fenwick's suspicious temper, in either case, that really bound Lord Findon.

'Write to the old boy'-- so Cuningham had advised again and again--'get something definite out of him.' But Fenwick had once or twice torn up a letter of the kind in morbid pride and despair.

Suppose he were rebuffed?
That would be an end of the Findon connexion, and he could not bring himself to face it.