them
simply with the back of his hand and went on booming faintly. 'Thought
so. You are enough to make one cry. I thought my artist's life was
finished, and here you come along from devil knows where with this young
friend of mine, who isn't a bad smearer of canvases--but it's marble and
bronze that you want. . . I shall finish my artist's life with your face;
but I shall want a bit of those shoulders, too. . . You hear, Allegre, I
must have a bit of her shoulders, too. I can see through the cloth that
they are divine. If they aren't divine I will eat my hat. Yes, I will
do your head and then--_nunc dimittis_.'

"These were the first words with which the world greeted her, or should I
say civilization did; already both her native mountains and the cavern of
oranges belonged to a prehistoric age. 'Why don't you ask him to come
this afternoon?' Allegre's voice suggested gently. 'He knows the way to
the house.'

"The old man said with extraordinary fervour, 'Oh, yes I will,' pulled up
his horse and they went on. She told me that she could feel her
heart-beats for a long time. The remote power of that voice, those old
eyes full of tears, that noble and ruined face, had affected her
extraordinarily she said. But perhaps what affected her was the shadow,
the still living shadow of a great passion in the man's heart.

"Allegre remarked to her calmly: 'He has been a little mad all his
life.'"

CHAPTER III

Mills lowered the hands holding the extinct and even cold pipe before his
big face.

"H'm, shoot an arrow into that old man's heart like this? But was there
anything done?"

"A terra-cotta bust, I believe. Good? I don't know. I rather think
it's in this house. A lot of things have been sent down from Paris here,
when she gave up the Pavilion. When she goes up now she stays in hotels,
you know. I imagine it is locked up in one of these things," went on
Blunt, pointing towards the end of the studio where amongst the
monumental presses of dark oak lurked the shy dummy which had worn the
stiff robes of the Byzantine Empress and the amazing hat of the "Girl,"
rakishly. I wondered whether that dummy had travelled from Paris, too,
and whether with or without its head. Perhaps that head had been left
behind, having rolled into a corner of some empty room in the dismantled
Pavilion. I represented it to myself very lonely, without features, like
a turnip, with a mere peg sticking out where the neck