is head.

"I shall have her removed to England, if St. John wishes it," Marston
said. "God knows I'd like to have the account show some offsetting of
the debit."

As they left the gates for the omnibus, Marston added:

"If St. John will continue to act as my agent, he can manage it from
the other side of the Channel. I shall not be often in Paris."

Later, he turned suddenly to the Kentuckian, with a half-smile.

"We swindled St. John," he exclaimed. "We bought back the pictures at
Saxon prices." His voice became unusually soft. "And Frederick Marston
can never paint another so good as the portrait. We must set that
right. Do you know--" the man laughed sheepishly--"it's rather
disconcerting to find that one has spent seven years in self-worship?"

Steele smiled with relief at the change of subject.

"Is that the sensation of being deified?" he demanded. "Does one
simply feel that Olympus is drawn down to sea level?"

Shortly after, Marston sent a brief note to Duska.

"I shall say little," he wrote. "I can't be sure you will give me a
hearing, but also I can not go on until I have begged it. I can not
bear that any report shall reach you until I have myself reported. My
only comfort is that I concealed nothing that I had the knowledge to
tell you. There is now no blank in my life, and yet it is all blank,
and must remain blank unless I can come to you. I am free to speak,
and, if you give it to me, no one else can deny me the right to speak.
All that I said on that night when a certain garden was bathed in the
moon is more true now than then, and now I speak with full knowledge.
Can you forgive everything?"

And the girl reading the letter let it drop in her lap, and looked out
through her window across the dazzling whiteness of the _Promenade
des Anglais_ to the purple Mediterranean. Once more, her eyes lighted
from deep cobalt to violet.

"But there was nothing to forgive," she softly told the sea.

CHAPTER XXI

When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the
_Promenade des Anglais_ at Nice, it was a much improved and
rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature who had opened
the closed door of the "academy" in the _Quartier Latin_, and had
dropped the key on the floor. Although still a trifle gaunt, he was
much the same person who, almost a year before, had clung to the
pickets at Churchill Downs, and halted in his view of a two-year-old
finish. Just as the raw air of