my life," he said, and his sight cleared as he spoke,
and he saw her face transformed by its emotion, her eyes adoring and
beautiful, her lips parted as if the breath of life he had given to her
left her wondering still.

"Don't tell me of anything to-day."

He took the hand that lay on his shoulder and raised it. "I must tell
you now."

"I ask for nothing, Antony. What does the past matter?" She bent forward
and kissed him on his eyes. "I would like to think they had never looked
at anything before to-day."

He smiled. "But they have looked hard at many things, Mary. They will
always look deeply, and I want you to look back with me."

She sighed. "Then, forward with me." The Pekinese dog sprang into her
lap. "Go on," she said docilely; "but I am so divinely happy! Why should
we think of anything else?"

He brushed away the mist that threatened again to cloud his vision. He
took her hand and held it firmly and, lifting up his head, began frankly
to tell her of his past.

"I am a Southerner, born in New Orleans...."

As he talked she listened spellbound by his power of narrative. In his
speech he was as charming a creator as in his art. She saw the picture
of his Louisiana home; she saw the exquisite figure of his mother; she
saw the beginning of his genius and his poetic, dreaming years. When he
began the more realistic part of his story, talking aloud like this of
himself for the first time to a woman he loved, he forgot her entirely,
carried back by a strong force to the beginning of his struggles in New
York. She listened, unchanged and a little terrified, as he told her of
his work in the sculptor's studio, disguising the name of the man for
whom he worked. She stopped him, her hand on his. So had she asked
previously Cedersholm. Her voice brought him back to the present, to a
feeling that for nothing in the world would he tell her yet, and he said
"No, no," veiling the fact so that he could not guess, and passed over
the misery of his master's treachery and his defeat. But through his
narrative like a flame, charming, brilliant, vivifying, flashed the
personality of Bella, though a child only, still a woman, and again Mary
Faversham, with her hand on his stopped him--

"What a bewitching child," she said. "Don't speak of her with such fire.
I believe you loved her! She must be a woman."

Antony stirred. He rose from the divan where he was sitting and crossed
over to the fireplace and stood by the eight