teele spoke quietly, "but those two
pictures we must have. I will pay you a fair profit. For the time, at
least, the matter shall go no further."

St. John bowed with deep gratitude.

"They shall be delivered," he said.

Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned
to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head.

"We have unearthed that conspiracy," he said, "but we have learned
nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston
enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there."

"And I shall go with you," the girl promptly declared.

CHAPTER XVIII

On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the
_Boulevard St. Michel_, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old
and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all
its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the
_concierge_ presides. This house has had other years in which it stood
pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its
splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it
presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory,
heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have
failed to enroll their names among the great.

Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain
consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case,
announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago,
and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean
Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor _atelier_ how it was
done.

He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, "Aphrodite
Rising from the Foam," was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne
amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the
folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding
lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her
recess.

The master, looking about on the many industrious, if not
intellectual, faces, was discoursing on Marston's feeling for values.

"He did not learn it," declared M. Hautecoeur: "he was born with it.
He did not acquire it: he evolved it. A faulty value caused him pain
as a false note causes pain to the true musician." Then, realizing
that this was dangerous doctrine from the lips of one who was
endeavoring to instill the quality into others, born with less gifted
natu