yes a challenging glance
of ridicule.

Steele did not object to the good-humored baiting, but he looked about
him, and was thankful that the girl on her way to Nice could not look
in on this enthusiasm over the painter's home-coming; could not see to
what Marston was returning; what character of devotees were pledging
the promotion of the first disciple to the place of the worshiped
master.

Some half-drunken student, his hand upon the shoulder of a model,
lifted a tilting glass, and shouted thickly, "_Vive l'art! Vive
Marston!_" The crowd took up the shout, and there was much clinking of
glass.

Steele, with a feeling of deep disgust, rose to go. The other _quais_
of the Seine were better after all. But, as he reached for his hat, he
felt a hand on his shoulder, and, turning, recognized, with a glow of
welcome, the face of M. Herve. Like himself, M. Herve seemed out of
his element, or would have seemed so had he also not had, like Steele,
that adaptability which makes some men fit into the picture wherever
they may find themselves. The two shook hands, and dropped back on the
cushions of the wall seat.

"I have heard the story," the Frenchman assured Steele. "Monsieur may
spare himself the pain of repeating it. It is a miracle!"

Steele was looking into his glass.

"It is a most unhappy miracle," he replied.

"But, _mon dieu_!" M. Herve looked across the table, tapping the
Kentuckian's sleeve with his outstretched fingers. "It makes one
think, _mon ami_--it makes one think!"

His vis-a-vis only nodded, and Herve went on:

"It brings home to one the indestructibility of the true genius--the
unquenchable fire of it! Destiny plays a strange game. She has here
taken a man, and juggled with his life; battered his identity to
unrecognizable fragments; set a seal on his past. Yet, his genius she
could not efface. That burned through to the light--sounded on
insistently through the confusion of wreck, even as that violin sounds
through this hell of noises and disorder--the great unsilenced chord!
The man thinks he copies another. Not so--he is merely groping to find
himself. Never have I thought so deeply as since I have heard this
story."

For a time, Steele did not reply. To him, the personal element drowned
the purely academic interest of the psychological phase in this
tragedy.

Suddenly, a new element of surprise struck him, and he leaned across
the table, his voice full of questioning.

"But you," he de