I don't wonder you are a hermit."

"Oh," he exclaimed, "don't compliment this desolation."

She interrupted him. "I think it is charming. You feel the atmosphere of
living and of work. You seem to see things here that are not visible in
rooms where nothing is accomplished."

He sat down beside her. "Are there such rooms?" he asked. "I don't
believe it. The most thrilling dramas take place, don't they, in the
most commonplace settings?"

As though she feared that Dearborn would come back, she said quickly--

"I don't know why you should have been so unkind. I have heard nothing
of you for weeks, do you know, excepting through Potowski. It wasn't
kind, was it?"

"I was rude and ungrateful, but I could not do otherwise."

She bent forward to him as he sat on the divan. "I wonder why?" she
asked. "Were we not friends? Could you not have trusted me? Do you think
me so narrow and conventional--so stupid?"

"Oh!" he exclaimed, and he smiled a little, thinking of Nora Scarlet.
"It is not quite what you think."

He was angry with her, with the facts of their existence, with her great
fortune, and her engagement to the man he despised above all others, his
own incognito and the fact that she had sent Cedersholm to buy his
study, and that he could not express to her, without insult, his
feelings or tell her frankly who he was.

"You were not kind, Mr. Rainsford."

He reflected that she thought him the lover of a Latin Quarter student,
if she thought at all, which she probably did not. Without humility he
confessed--

"Yes, I have been very rude indeed." He wiped his clay-covered hands
slowly, each finger separately, his eyes bent. He rose abruptly. "Would
you care to look at a study I am making for Barye?" He drew off the
cloths from the clay he was engaged in modelling. She only glanced at
the group and he asked her, almost roughly: "Why did you buy by proxy my
little study in the exhibition? Why did you ask Cedersholm to do so?"

Mrs. Faversham looked at him in frank surprise. "Your study in the
exhibition? I knew nothing of it. I did not know you had exhibited. I
have been ill for a fortnight, and have not seen a paper or heard a hit
of news."

He was softened. His emotions violently contradicted themselves, and he
saw now that she had grown a little thinner and looked pale.

"Have you been ill? What a boor you must think me never to have
returned!"

She was standing close to the pedestal and rested her hand