His first sensation, as he saw her, was as if a sudden light had broken upon a soul's darkness which until this moment had blinded him, oppressed him, condemned him; then there came a great revulsion against himself. Mrs. Faversham was very pale, as white as the bust by whose side she stood. She held out her hand, in its delicate glove, and tried to greet him naturally.

"How do you do, Mr. Rainsford?"

He was conscious of how kind she was, how womanly. He had refused her invitation and flaunted in her sight a vulgar pastoral. His cheeks were hot, his lips hardly formed a greeting. This was the work he had offered as an excuse to her when he had said that he could not go to Versailles. "Then what is it to her?" he thought; "she is engaged to be married to Cedersholm. What am I or my vulgarities to her?" There was a fresh revulsion.

"Will you let me present Miss Scarlet," he said quietly, "Mrs. Faversham?"

Mrs. Faversham, who had recovered herself, gave her hand into the woollen glove of Nora Scarlet, and, looking at the young girl, said that perhaps they had been sketching.

"Not in January," replied Nora with perfect self-possession. From the crown of Mrs. Faversham's fur hat to the lady's shoes, the girl's honest eyes had taken in her elegance and her grace. "We have been walking a bit after Paris."

Fairfax felt as though he had been separated from this lady for a long time, as though he had just come back, after a voyage whose details were tiresome. She seemed too divine to him and at once cruelly near and cruelly removed, in her dark dress, her small walking hat with a spray of mistletoe shining against the fur, her faultless shoes, her face so sweet and high-bred under her veil, her aloofness from everything with which he came in contact, her freedom from care and struggle, from temptation, from the sordidness of which he had long been a part. He suffered horribly; short as the moment was, the acuteness of its sensations comprised for him a miserable eternity.

"I have my carriage here, Mr. Rainsford. Will you not let me drive you both back to Paris?"

He wanted nothing but to go with her then, any way, the farther the better, and for ever. It came upon him suddenly, and he knew it. He refused, of course, angry to be obliged to do so, angrier still at what he was sure she would think was the reason for his doing so. She bade them both good-bye, now thoroughly mistress of herself, and reminded him that she would expect him the next day at three. She asked Miss Scarlet many questions about her work and the schools, as they walked along a little together, before Mrs. Faversham took the path that led to the gate where her carriage waited.

When they were together again alone, Fairfax and his companion, in the tram, he felt as though he had cut himself off once again, by his folly, from everything desirable in the world. The night was cold. He did not realize how silent he was or how silent she was. When they had nearly reached Paris, Miss Scarlet said —

"Is it her portrait you thought I might get to paint?"

The question startled him, the voice as well. It was like being spoken to suddenly by a perfect stranger.

"Yes," he answered, "she is wonderfully generous and open-hearted. I am sure that she would give you an order."

"Please don't bother," said the girl proudly. "I would not take the order."

Her tone was so curt and short that it brought Fairfax back to realities.

"Why, pray, don't you find her paintable?" he asked.

The girl's voice was contemptuous. "I don't know. I didn't look at her with that idea."

Fairfax had nothing left him but his self-reproach, his humiliation, his sense of degradation, though God knows the outing was innocent enough! The Thing had happened. The Event had transpired. The veil had been drawn away from his heart when he saw her there in the park and spoke to her. The idea that she must think him light and vulgar-minded, an ordinary Bohemian, amusing himself as is the fashion in the Latin Quarter, was unbearable to him. He would have given his right hand to have been alone in the park and to have met her alone. Under the spell of his suffering, he said cruelly to the girl whom he had so wantonly captured —

"If you won't let me help you in my way, I'm afraid I can't help you at all."

And she returned, controlling her voice: "No, I am afraid you cannot help me."

He was unconscious of her until they reached the centre of Paris and he found himself in the street by her side, and they were crossing the Pond des Arts on foot. The lamps were lit. The tumult and stir of the city was around them, the odour of fires and the perfume of the city pungent to their nostrils. They walked along silently, and Fairfax asked her suddenly —

"Where shall I take you? Where do you live?" and realized as he spoke how little he knew of her, how unknown they were to each other, and yet what a factor she had been in his emotional life. He had held her in his arms and kissed her not three hours ago.

She put her hand out to him. "We will say good-bye here," she said evenly. "I can go home alone."

"Oh no," he objected, but he saw by her face that in her, too, a revulsion had taken place, perhaps stronger than his own. He was ashamed and annoyed. He put out his hand and hers just touched it.

"Thank you," she said, "for the excursion, and would you please give me my portfolio?"

He handed it to her. Then quite impulsively: "I don't want to part from you like this. Why should I? Let me take you home, won't you?"

He wanted to say, "Forgive me," but she had possessed herself of her little sketches, the poor, inadequate work of fruitless months. She turned and was gone almost running up the quays, as she had run before him down the alley of Versailles. He saw her go with great relief, and, when the little brown figure was lost in the Paris multitude, he turned and limped home to the studio in the Quais.

CHAPTER XIV

He did not go to the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne at the appointed hour, and was so ungracious as not to send her any word. He took the time for his own work, and from thence on devoted himself to finishing the portrait of his mother. Meanwhile, Dearborn, enveloped in smoke, dug into the mine of his imagination and brought up treasures and nearly completed his play. He recited from it copiously, read it aloud, wept at certain scenes which he assured Tony would never be as sad to any spectator as they were to him.

"I wrote them on an empty stomach," he said.

Fairfax, meanwhile, finished his statuette and decided to send it to an exhibition of sculpture to be opened in the Rue de Sèvres. He had bitterly renounced his worldly life, and was shortly obliged to pawn his dress suit, and, indeed, anything else that the young men could gather together went to the Mont de Piété, and once more the comrades were nearly destitute and were really clad and fed by their visions and their dreams.

"You see," he said one day, shortly, to Dearborn, when the silence between the quays and the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne had grown intolerable to him, "you see how indifferent she is. She doesn't know what has become of me. For all she knows I may be drowned in the Seine."

"Or imprisoned for debt," said Dearborn, cheerfully, "that's more likely. The tailor doesn't believe you have gone to London, Fairfax. Try a more congenial place, Tony. Let it be Monte Carlo next time – every one goes there sooner or later."

When he came back from Versailles he told Dearborn nothing about his escapade in detail, simply mentioning the fact that he had taken out a little girl to spend the day in the woods and that she had bored him in the end, and that he had had the misfortune to meet Mrs. Faversham unexpectedly.

Dearborn was one of those subtle spirits who do not need to be told everything. He rated Antony for playing what he called an ungallant part to the little Bohemian.

"You say her hair was like chrysanthemums and that she had violet eyes? Why, she is a priceless treasure, Tony! How could you desert her?"

And several times Dearborn tried to extract something more about the deserted little girl from his friend, but it was in vain.

"I am sorry," Dearborn said. "We need women, Tony – we need to see the flutter of their dresses, to watch them come and go in this little room. By Jove, I often want to open the door and invite up the concierge, the concierge's wife, his aunt 'and children three' or any, or all of Paris who would come and infuse new life into us. Anything that is real flesh and blood, to chase for a moment visions and dreams away and let us touch real hands."

"You don't go out enough, old man."

"And you went out too much, Fairfax. It's not going out – I want some one to come in. I want to see the studio peopled. You have grown so morose and I have become such a navvy that our points of view will be false the first thing we know."

The snow had been falling lightly. There was a little fringe of it along the sill, and toward sunset it had turned cold, and under the winter fog the sun hung like an orange ball behind a veil. The Seine flowed tawny and yellow under their eyes, as they stood together talking in the window.

Fairfax was in his painting clothes, the playwright in his beloved dressing-gown that Fairfax had not the heart to pawn for coffee and coal. There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs without.

"It's the fellows coming to take my statuette," said Fairfax.

"It's the tailor, the bootmaker and the shirtmaker," said Dearborn. "Go behind the screen, Tony – run to Monte Carlo."

There was a tap at the door and a cheerful voice called —

"Mr. Rainsford, c'est moi."

"It is Potowski. I will have to let him in, Bob. Here's all Paris for you. You wanted it."

He opened the door for Count Potowski.

The Polish singer came quickly in, his silk hat and his cane in his hand. He looked around brightly.

"You don't hide from me," he said. "I have a fatal grasp when I take hold. You never call on me, Monsieur – so I call on you. Guerrea! – which means in Polish what 'altro' means in Italian, 'Doch' in German, 'Voilà' in French, and in unenthusiastic English, nothing at all."

Fairfax presented the Count to Dearborn, who beamed on him, amused, and Potowski glanced at the cold, cheerless Bohemia. It was meagre. It was cold. Privation was apparent. The place was not without a charm, and it had distinction. There were the evidences of intense work, of devotion to the ideal. There were the evidences of good taste and good breeding. The few bits of furniture were old and had been bought for a song, but selected with judgment. Fairfax's statuette waited on its pedestal to be carried away – in the winter light, softened and subdued by mist, Mrs. Fairfax read in her chair. Dearborn's table, strewn with his papers and books, told of hours spent at a beloved labour. There was nothing material to attract – no studio properties or decorations to speak of. Two long divans were placed against a wall of agreeable colour. There was nothing but the spirit of art and work, and the spirit of youth as well, but Potowski was delighted. He pointed to the statuette.

"This," he said, "is the lovely lady with whom you have been shut up all these days. It is charming, Monsieur."

"It is a study of my mother as I remember her."

"I salute it," said Potowski, making a little inclination. "I salute you. It is beautiful." He put his hand on Fairfax's arm. "You do my wife. You do the Contessa," said Potowski, "the same. I adore it. It looks my wife. It might be her, Monsieur. But all beauty is alike, is not it? One lovely woman is all women. Are you not of my opinion?"

He swam toward Dearborn who was fascinated by Potowski's overcoat lined with fur, and with the huge fur collar, with his patent shoes with their white tops, with his bright waistcoat, his single eyeglass, his shining silk hat and, above all, by the gay foreign face, its waxed moustache and its sparkling dark eyes.

Dearborn wrapped his dressing-gown modestly around him to conceal his shirtless, collarless condition. Running his hands through dishevelled red hair, he responded —

"No, I don't agree with you. I guess your feminine psychology is at fault there, Count."

"Rreally not," murmured the Count, looking at him eagerly.

"Mr. Dearborn is a playwright," said Antony. "He is a great student of character."

Potowski waved his hand in its light glove. "You write plays, Monsieur? You shall write me a libretto. I have been looking for ever for some one to write the words for a hopera I am making."

Dearborn nodded. "Far from being all alike, I don't think that there have been two women alike since Eve."

"Rreally!"

Potowski looked at the red-headed man as if he wondered whether he had met and known all women.

"You find it so, Monsieur? Now I have been married three times. Every one of them were lovely women. I find them all the same."

"You must have a very adaptable, assimilating and modifying nature," said Dearborn, smiling.

"Modifying? What is that?" asked the Pole sweetly.

Neither of the young men made excuses for the icy cold room. They were too proud. They had nothing to offer Potowski, not even a cigarette, but the Pole forced his cigar-case upon them, telling them that he made his cigarettes with a machine by the thousand.

"My wife, Contessa Potowski, makes them, I mean. I do myself the pleasure to send you a box. They're contraband. You will be arrested if the police knows so."

"That," said Dearborn, "would really disappoint the tailor. I think he would like to get in his own score first. But I would rather go to prison as a contrabander than as a debtor."

They sat on the sofa together and smoked, their breath white in the cold room. But the amiable Potowski beamed on them, and Antony saw Dearborn's delight at the outside element. And Dearborn sketched his scenario, the colour hot in his thin cheeks, and Potowski, rubbing his hands to warm them, hummed airs from his own opera in a heavenly voice, and the voice and the enthusiasm magnetized poor Dearborn, carried out of his rut, and before he knew it he had promised to write a libretto for "Fiametta."

Whilst they talked the porters came and took away the statuette of Mrs. Fairfax, and Potowski said —

"It was like seeing they carry away my wife." And, when they had gone, Antony lighted the candles and Potowski rose and cried, as though the idea had just come to him: "Guerrea! My friends, I am alone to-night. My wife has gone to sing in Brussels. I implore you to come out to dinner with me – I know not where." He glanced at the sculptor and playwright, as they stood in the candle light. He had only seen Fairfax a well-dressed visitor at Mrs. Faversham's entertainments. On him now a different light fell. In his working clothes, there was nothing poverty-stricken about him, but the marks of need were unmistakably in the environment. He spoke to Dearborn, but he looked at Fairfax. "I have grown very fond of him. I love to speak my thoughts at him. We don't always agree, but we are always good for each other. I have not seen him for some time. I thought he go away."

Dearborn smiled. "He was just going to Monte Carlo," he murmured.

Potowski, who did not hear, went on: "We will go and eat in some restaurant on this side of the river. I am tired of the Café de Paris. We will see a play afterwards. There is 'La Dame aux Camélias' with the divine Sarah. We laugh at dinner and we shall go and sob at La Dame aux Camélias. I like a happy weeping now and then." He swam toward them affably and appealingly. "I don't dress. I go as I am."

Dearborn grasped one of the yellow-gloved hands and shook it.

"Hang it all! I'm going, Tony. There are two pair of boots, anyhow. I haven't been to a play," he laughed excitedly, "since I was a child. Hustle, Tony, we will toss up for the best suit of clothes."

The drama of Dumas gave Antony a beautiful escape from reality. La Dame aux Camélias disenchanted him from his own problems for the time. In the Count's box he sat in the background and fed his eyes and his ears with the romantic and ardent art of the Second Empire. He found the piece great, mobile, and palpitating, and he was not ashamed. The divine Sarah and Marguerite Gautier died before his eyes, and out of the ashes womanhood arose and called to him, as the Venus de Milo had called to him down the long gallery, and distractions he had known seemed soulless and unreal shapes. He worshipped Dumas in his creation.

"Rainsford," whispered Potowski, laying his hand on Antony's knee, "what do you t'ink, my friend?" The tears were raining down his mobile face; he sighed. "Arrt," he said in his mellow whisper, "is only the expression of the feeling, the beautiful expression of the feeling. That is the meaning of all arrt."

The big red curtain fell slowly and the three men, poet, singer and sculptor, kept their seats as though still under the spell of Dumas and unable to break it.

"Tony," said Dearborn, as they went out together, "I am going to burn up all four acts."

CHAPTER XV

The middle of January arrived, and he thought Cedersholm would have come by that time and supposed that they would be off for Rome.

The study of his mother was accepted by the jury for the exhibition in the Rue de Sèvres, and Fairfax went on the opening day, saw his name in the catalogue, and his study on the red pedestal made a dark mellow note amongst the marbles. He stood with the crowd and listened with beating heart to the comments of the public. He watched the long-haired Bohemians and the worldly people, the Philistine and the élite as they surged, a little sea of criticism, approval, praise and blame, through the rooms.

"Pas mal, ça." "Here is a study that is worth looking at." "By whom is this?"

And each time that he heard his name read aloud – Thomas Rainsford – he was jealous of it for Antony. It seemed a sacrilege, a treachery. He wandered about, looking at the other exhibits, but could not keep away from his own, and came back timidly, happily, to stand by the figure of his mother in her chair. There was much peace in the little work of art, much repose. He seemed to see himself again a boy, as he had been that day when she asked for the cherries and he had run off to climb for them – and had gone limping ever since. She had sat languidly with her book that day, as she sat now, immortalized by her son in clay.

Some one came up and touched his arm. "Bonjour, Rainsford." It was Barye, his chief. He had been looking at the group behind the sculptor. He said briefly: "Je vous félicite, monsieur." He smiled on his journeyman from under shaggy brows. "They will talk about you in the Figaro. C'est exquis."

Fairfax thanked him and watched Barye's face as the master scrutinized and went around the little figure. He put out his hand to Fairfax.

"Come and see me to-morrow. I want to talk to you."

Fairfax answered that he would be sure to come, just as though he were not modelling at the studio for ten francs a day. He had been careful all along not to repeat his error of years before. He had avoided personalities with his master, as he toiled like a common day-labourer, content to make his living and to display no originality; but now he felt a sense of fellowship with the great Frenchman and walked along by Barye's side to the door, proud to be so distinguished. He glanced over the crowd in the hope of seeing Her, but instead, walking through the rooms, his eyeglass in his eye, the little red badge of the Legion of Honour in his coat, he saw Cedersholm.

The following day, when he went to the exhibition, the man at the door handed a catalogue to Fairfax and pointed to No. 102, against which was the word "Sold." His price had been unpretentious.

"Moreover," said the man, "No. 102 will certainly have a medal."

Fairfax, his hands in his empty pockets, was less impressed by that prognostication than by the fact that there was money for him somewhere. The man opened the desk and handed Fairfax an envelope with five hundred francs in it.

"Who was the purchaser?" Fairfax looked at the receipt he was given to sign and read: "Sold to Mr. Cedersholm."

"Mais non," he exclaimed shortly, "ça, non!"

He was assured, however, that it was the American sculptor and no other. On his way home he reflected, "She sent him to purchase it." And the five hundred francs bill burned in his pocket. Then he called himself a fool and asked what possible interest she could still have in Thomas Rainsford, whose news she had not taken in four weeks. And also, he reflected, that so far as Cedersholm was concerned, Thomas Rainsford had nothing to do with Antony Fairfax. "He merely admired my work," he reflected bitterly. "He has seemed always singularly to admire it."

He paid some pressing debts, got his clothes out of pawn, left Dearborn what he wanted, and was relieved when the last sou of the money was gone.

"I wonder, Bob," he said to Dearborn, "when I shall ever have any 'serious money.'" And with sudden tenderness he thought of Bella.

Dearborn, who had also recovered a partially decent suit of clothes, displayed his trousers and said —

"I think some chap has been wearing my clothes and stretched them." They hung loose on him.

Fairfax laughed. "You have only shrunk, Bob, that's all. You need feeding up."

The studio had undergone a slight transformation, which the young men had been forced to accede to. A grand piano covered with a bright bit of brocade stood in the centre of the studio, a huge armchair, with a revolving smoking-table, by its side. The chair was for Dearborn to loll in and dream in whilst Potowski played and sang at the piano. Dearborn was thus supposed to work the libretto for "Fiametta."

Potowski, who came in at all hours, charmed the very walls with his voice, sang and improvised; Fairfax worked on the study he was making for Barye, and Dearborn, in the big chair, swathed in his wrapper, made notes, or more often fell serenely to sleep, for he worked all night on his own beloved drama, and if it had not been for Potowski he would have slept nearly all day. The Pole, at present, had gone to Belgium to fetch his wife, who had been away for several weeks.

When there was a knock on the door on this afternoon, the young men, used to unexpected visitors, cried out —

"Come in – entrez donc!"

But there was the murmur of a woman's voice without, and Fairfax, his sculpting tools in his hands, opened the door. It was Mrs. Faversham.

He stood for a dazed second unable even to welcome her. Dearborn sprang up in embarrassment and amusement. Mrs. Faversham herself was not embarrassed.

"Is not Potowski here?" shaking hands with Antony. "I had expected to meet him. Didn't he tell you that I was coming? I understood that you expected me."

Fairfax shut the door behind her. "You are more than welcome. This is my friend, Mr. Dearborn. You may have heard Potowski speak of him."

She shook hands with the red-haired playwright, whom she captivated at once by her cordiality and her sweet smile. Of course she had heard of him and the libretto. Potowski had given her to understand that she might hear the overture of "Fiametta."

The young men exchanged glances and neither of them told her that Potowski was in Belgium. Dearborn rolled the chair toward her and waved to it gracefully.

"This is the chair of the muses, Mrs. Faversham, and not one of them has been good enough to sit in it before now."

She laughed and sat down, and Fairfax looked at her with joy.

"We must give Mrs. Faversham some tea," said Dearborn, "and if you will excuse me while we wait for Potowski, I will pop out and get some milk and you boil the tea-kettle."

He took his hat and cape and ran out, leaving them alone.

Mrs. Faversham looked at the sculptor in his velveteen working clothes, the background of his workshop, its disorder and its poverty around him.

"How nice it is here," she said. "I don't wonder you are a hermit."

"Oh," he exclaimed, "don't compliment this desolation."

She interrupted him. "I think it is charming. You feel the atmosphere of living and of work. You seem to see things here that are not visible in rooms where nothing is accomplished."

He sat down beside her. "Are there such rooms?" he asked. "I don't believe it. The most thrilling dramas take place, don't they, in the most commonplace settings?"

As though she feared that Dearborn would come back, she said quickly —

"I don't know why you should have been so unkind. I have heard nothing of you for weeks, do you know, excepting through Potowski. It wasn't kind, was it?"

"I was rude and ungrateful, but I could not do otherwise."

She bent forward to him as he sat on the divan. "I wonder why?" she asked. "Were we not friends? Could you not have trusted me? Do you think me so narrow and conventional – so stupid?"

"Oh!" he exclaimed, and he smiled a little, thinking of Nora Scarlet. "It is not quite what you think."

He was angry with her, with the facts of their existence, with her great fortune, and her engagement to the man he despised above all others, his own incognito and the fact that she had sent Cedersholm to buy his study, and that he could not express to her, without insult, his feelings or tell her frankly who he was.

"You were not kind, Mr. Rainsford."

He reflected that she thought him the lover of a Latin Quarter student, if she thought at all, which she probably did not. Without humility he confessed —

"Yes, I have been very rude indeed." He wiped his clay-covered hands slowly, each finger separately, his eyes bent. He rose abruptly. "Would you care to look at a study I am making for Barye?" He drew off the cloths from the clay he was engaged in modelling. She only glanced at the group and he asked her, almost roughly: "Why did you buy by proxy my little study in the exhibition? Why did you ask Cedersholm to do so?"

Mrs. Faversham looked at him in frank surprise. "Your study in the exhibition? I knew nothing of it. I did not know you had exhibited. I have been ill for a fortnight, and have not seen a paper or heard a hit of news."

He was softened. His emotions violently contradicted themselves, and he saw now that she had grown a little thinner and looked pale.

"Have you been ill? What a boor you must think me never to have returned!"

She was standing close to the pedestal and rested her hand on the support near his wooden tools. She wore a beautiful grey drees, such a one as only certain Parisian hands can create. It fitted her to perfection, displaying her shape, and, where the fur opened at the neck, amongst the lace he saw the gleaming and flashing of a jewel whose value would have made a man rich. Already the air was sweet with the fragrance of the scent she used. She had been in grey when he had first seen her on the day of the unveiling of the monument. Fairfax passed his hand across his eyes, as though to brush away a vision which, like a mist, was still between them. He put his hand down over hers on the pedestal.

"I love you," he said very low. "That is the matter. That is the trouble. I love you. I want you to know it. I dare love you. I am perfectly penniless and I am glad of it. I want to owe everything to my art, to climb through the thorns to where I shall some day reach. I am proud of my poverty and of my emancipation from everything that others think is necessary to happiness. I am rude. I cannot help it. I shall never see you again. I ought not to speak to you in my barren room. I know that you are not free and that you are going to be married, but you must hear once what I have to tell you. I love you… I love you."

She was as motionless as the grey study. He might himself have made and carved "the woman in her entirety," for she stood motionless before him.

"Tell Cedersholm," he said bitterly, "tell him that a poor sculptor, a struggler who lives to climb beyond him, who will some day climb beyond him, loves you."

The arrogance and pride of his words and her immobility affected him more than a reproof or even speech. He took her in his arms, and she was neither marble nor clay, but a woman there.

"Tell him," he murmured close to her cheek, "that I have kissed you and held you."

And here she said; "Hush!" almost inaudibly, and released herself. She was trembling. She put her hands to her eyes. "I shall tell him nothing. He is nothing to me. I sent him away when he first came, a fortnight ago. I shall never see Cedersholm again."

"What!" cried Tony, looking at her in rapture, "what, you are free?" At his heart there was triumph, excitement, wonder, all blending with the bigger emotion. He heard himself ask her eagerly: "Why, why did you do this?"

There were tears on her eyelids.

His face flushing, his eyes illumined, he looked down on her and lifted her face to him in both his hands.

"Why?"

"I think you know," she murmured, her lips trembling.

He gave a cry, and as he was about again to embrace her they heard Dearborn's step upon the stairs.

Mrs. Faversham was in the window looking out upon Paris, and Fairfax was modelling on his study when the playwright came in with a can of milk, some madeleines and a pot of jam.

After she had gone he wanted to escape and be alone, but Dearborn chatted, pacing the studio, whilst Fairfax dressed and shaved, praising the visitor.

"She's a great lady, Tony. What breeding and race! And she's not what the books call 'indifferent' to you."

"Go to the devil, Dearborn!"

Dearborn went to work instead, not to lose the inspiration of the lovely woman. He began a new scene, and dressed his character in dove grey with silver fox at her throat.