the name of Frederick Marston," he said, "I am challenged
to interest. Would I be asking too much if I sought to join you in
your talk of him?"

The girl looked up and welcomed him with her accustomed graciousness,
while Steele drew up a camp-stool, and the Frenchman seated himself.

For a while, he listened sitting there, his fingers clasped about his
somewhat stout knee, and his face gravely speculative, contributing to
the conversation nothing except his attention.

"You see, I am interested in Marston," he at length began.

The girl hesitated. She had just been expressing the opinion, possibly
absorbed from Saxon, that the personality of the artist was extremely
disagreeable. As she glanced at M. Herve, the thought flashed through
her mind that this might possibly be Marston himself. She knew that
master's fondness for the incognito. But she dismissed the idea as
highly fanciful, and even ventured frankly to repeat her criticism.

At last, Herve replied, with great gravity:

"Mademoiselle, I had the honor to know the great Frederick Marston
once. It was some years ago. He keeps himself much as a hermit might
in these days, but I am sure that the portion of the story I know is
not that of the vain man or of the poseur. Possibly," he hesitated
modestly, "it might interest mademoiselle?"

"I'm sure of it," declared the girl.

"Marston," he began, "drifted into the Paris _ateliers_ from your
country, callow, morbid, painfully young and totally inexperienced. He
was a tall, gaunt boy with a beard that grew hardly as fast as his
career, though finally it covered his face. Books and pictures he knew
with passionate love. With life, he was unacquainted; at men, he
looked distantly over the deep chasm of his bashfulness. Women he
feared, and of them he knew no more than he knew of dragons.

"He was eighteen then. He was in the _Salon_ at twenty-two, and at the
height of fame at twenty-six. He is now only thirty-three. What he
will be at forty, one can not surmise."

The Frenchman gazed for a moment at the spiraling smoke from his
cigarette, and halted with the uncertainty of a bard who doubts his
ability to do justice to his lay.

"I find the story difficult." He smiled with some diffidence, then
continued: "Had I the art to tell it, it would be pathos. Marston was
a generous fellow, beloved by those who knew him, but quarantined by
his morbid reserve from wide acquaintanceship. Temperament--ah, that
is a wonde