simple
faith of his childhood--had been all but stolen by ferocious and fiendish
hands from his mind, and that just now, in some miraculous way, it had
been returned.

It was as though the gentle hands of Maxine had put it back.

Maxine, when she reached her own apartments, turned on the electric light
in her sitting room, and sat down at once to write to the friend who was a
friend of Pugin's.

This friend was Sabatier.

She had studied art under him, and between artist and pupil lay that
mysterious bond which unites craftsmen. For Maxine was great in knowledge
and power, and above all in that instinct without which an artist is at
best an animated brush, a pencil under the dominion of mechanical force.

As she wrote, she little dreamed that the sympathy burning in her heart
and moving to eloquence her pen, was a thing born not from the sufferings
of an afflicted people, but of the love of a man. A child of her mind
begotten by the man she had just left, and whom, that night, she had
learned to love.

CHAPTER XL

PUGIN

Pugin lived in the Boulevard Haussmann. He had begun life quite low down
in the Parisian world on the quays as apprentice to Manasis, a jew
book-dealer, who has been dead twenty-five years, whose money has been
dispersed, whose name has been forgotten, of whom nothing remains on earth
but the few hours a day of time filched from him by Pugin.

Pugin had a hard and bitter fight for twenty years before he obtained
recognition. The garret and starvation act had been unduly prolonged in
the case of this genius, and it seemed a mystery where and how in the
ruined city which is at the heart of every city, in that _cour des
Miracles_ where the Bohemians camp, he had found, like a crystal vase, his
exquisite style, preserved it unbroken by mischance or shock of fate, and
carried it safely at last to the hands of Fame.

He was very rich now, very powerful, and very fortunate. Charitable, too,
and ever ready to assist a fellow-worker in straitened circumstances, and
to-day as he sat reading in the cool recesses of his library, and
listening to the sound of the Paris he loved floating in with the warm
June air through the open window, he felt at peace with all the world and
in a mood to do justice to his bitterest enemy.

The striped sun-blinds filtered the blaze outside, letting pass only a
diffused and honey-coloured twilight; a great bowl of roses filled the
room with the simple and deep