though--and a public of to-morrow!'

'Oh, all right,' said Philip. 'So long as you take a public of some
sort into consideration! I like your jester.'

He bent forward to look into the front line of the large composition
crowded with life-size figures on which Watson was engaged. It was an
illustration of some Chaucerian lines, describing the face of a man on
his way to execution, seen among a crowd:

'a pale face
Among a press ...'

so stricken that, amid all the thronging multitude, 'men might know
his face that was bestead' from all the rest.

The idea--of helpless pain, in the grip of cruel and triumphant
force--had been realised with a passionate wealth of detail,
comparable to some of the early work of Holman Hunt. The head of the
victim bound with blood-stained linen, a frightened girl hiding her
eyes, a mother weeping, a jester with the laugh withered on his lip by
this sudden vision of death and irremediable woe--and in the distance
a frail, fainting form, sweetheart or sister--each figure and group,
rendered often with very unequal technical merit, had yet in it
something harshly, intolerably true. The picture was too painful to be
borne; but it was neither common nor mean.

Cuningham turned away from it with a shudder.

'Some of it's magnificent, Dick--but I couldn't live with it if you