MEN I HAVE PAINTED
stone, for there seemed to be in the manner and the tone a slight rebuke. I was not wrong, for after another but shorter view out of the window, Mrs. Gladstone returned to the easel, and looking over it so that Mr. Gladstone could not see her face, she said firmly and decisively, "Mr. Hamilton, I know you should not be here. It must be an embarrassment to Sir Algernon to have you in the room when he is here." That finished the matter and, rising, I said, "Very well, Mrs. Gladstone, I will go out until the letters are finished." As I moved away Mr. Gladstone turned his head towards me, and I still remember the faintest of smiles and the most innocent of winks to console me for the disturbance. There is no doubt that, technically speaking, Mrs. Gladstone was right, although there had been nothing in the correspondence that could not have been shouted from the housetops, and I was so little curious, and my work so absorbing, that most of it made no impression upon me, yet in an unguarded moment something unusual might have been read that my ears should not have heard.
This was the second time that work on a portrait had been interrupted by a mischance, and, as I shall show in the next article, which deals with the making of a third and the last portrait, an interruption of a different kind almost prevented its completion.
About two years after the foregoing incident, while on a shooting expedition with a score or more of wild young spirits in the Matilija Canyon of the Sierra Nevadas, east of Santa Barbara, in Lower California, a telephone message came to me in those lonely and distant mountains that Mr. Edward H. Coates, the president of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, had acquired this portrait. No
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