ity."

"Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my
theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into
the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the
thing we urged upon him--the robust vision."

The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fashion of the
uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to
propound:

"What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the
difference?"

"Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!" The instructor sighed as he
smiled. "How says the English Fitzgerald? 'A hair perhaps divides the
false and true.' Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he
would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he
have confessed, he mixed them with ideals."

"But I fear we delay the posing," suggested Steele, moving, with
sudden apprehension, toward the door.

"I assure you, no!" prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness.
"It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the
usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston
canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then
understand why I find it impossible to answer her question."

* * * * *

When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow,
long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunned
unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of
brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were
fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr.
Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious
care--through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel
drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be
conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily
organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable
as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a
country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and
whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed
interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be
complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the
vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who
in the parlance of the peasants was a poor "innocent," a human
blank-book in a bin