He put on his hat and coat, and took up the letter. "Don't go there," repeated the voice. "No good will come of it."
"Rubbish!" he said. "I can't chuck up the picture. It's all right."
He went downstairs and out into Tite Street, a little confused by all this current of doubt and reasoning, and by no means absolutely sure of himself. But, annoyed at realising this, he began to go forward sturdily, and flung the letter into the first pillar-box he encountered.
As Wyndham read the reply to his letter, it seemed as if the kind, bluff voice of the old earl were itself speaking. "A few mornings! Come along and make your nice little sketches for the next half-century. We have often thought of you, and wondered what you were up to. I think we may say with truth that we've missed you. This is a dull house now, and I suppose I'm getting old and dull myself. At any rate I've many a twinge in the joints, and am inclined to shut myself up in my library, though I'm never much of a reader." Then there was a PS. "Somebody or other tells me that you are contemplating matrimony. Well, you're a brave young fellow, and I like you for it. I congratulate you, and wish you luck."
As the next morning turned out fairly clear, Wyndham took his materials with him into a hansom, and rang the bell at Grosvenor Place at about ten o'clock. Not only had he decided that his misgivings were entirely morbid, but as a matter of course he had been quite open with the Robinsons about the arrangement. He had indeed explained to Alice some considerable time ago that he should in all likelihood find it necessary to make these fresh sketches on the very scene of the picture. It did not seem anything out of the way to her; she regarded it as a pure matter of work. It was sufficient that she understood his disappearance from the studio in the midst of these busy times. And as he had made it a point that she should possess a key of the new house just as she had had one of the old studio, she and her mother could come and go as they pleased in his absence, and proceed with their engrossing business of embellishing his hall and stairway.
But as he set foot in the house at Grosvenor Place after this long interval of years, Wyndham could not maintain his reasoned conviction of the simplicity and insignificance of the occasion.