he
half-starved, hungry way of being poor, now his commissions clothed
him and paid for his claret, and, above all, made it possible for him
to indulge the one soul he loved with the simple comforts that
softened her suffering.

The daughter of St. John required some small luxuries which it
delighted the Englishman to give her. He had been proud when she
married Frederick Marston, he had been distressed when the marriage
proved a thing of bitterness, and during the past years he had watched
her grow thin, and had feared at first, and known later, that she had
fallen prey to the tubercular troubles which had caused her mother's
death.

St. John had been a petty sort, and had not withstood the whisperings
of dishonest motives. Paradoxically his admiration for Frederick
Marston was, seemingly at least, wholly sincere.

In this hero-worship for the painter, who had failed as a husband to
make his daughter happy, there was no disloyalty for the daughter. He
knew that Marston had given all but the love he had not been able to
give and that he had simulated this until her own insight pierced the
deception, refusing compassion where she demanded love.

The men who rendered unto Marston their enthusiastic admiration were
men of a cult, and tinged with a sort of cult fanaticism. St. John, as
father-in-law, agent and correspondent, was enabled to pose along the
Boulevard St. Michel as something of a high priest, and in this small
vanity he gloried. So, when the questioners of the cafes bombarded him
with inquiries as to when Marston would tire of his pose of hermit and
return to Paris, the British father-in-law would throw out his shallow
chest, and allow an enigmatical smile to play in his pale eyes, and a
faint uplift to come to the corners of his thin lips, but he never
told.

"I have a letter here," he would say, tapping the pocket of his coat.
"The master is well, and says that he feels his art to be broadening."

Between the man and his daughter, the subject of the painter was never
mentioned. After her return from England, where she had spent the
first year after Marston dropped out of her life, she had exacted from
her father a promise that his name should not be spoken between them,
and the one law St. John never transgressed was that of devotion to
her.

Her life was spent in the lodgings, to which St. John clung because
they were in the building where Marston had painted. She never
suggested a removal to more