be satisfactorily adjusted."

"I doubt it, Mr. Cedersholm."

Cedersholm, already interested in the man as a worker, became now
interested in his personality, and found him curious, settled himself
comfortably in his chair and swung his monocle, which he still wore, by
its string. He saw the face of his host indistinctly, and his eyes
wandered around the vast, shadowy studio where the swathed casts stood
in the corners. The place gave him a twinge of jealousy and awakened all
his longings as an artist.

"It makes me acutely suffer," he said, "to come into the workshop of the
sculptor. Four years of enforced idleness----" Then he broke in abruptly
and said, "You have apparently settled already in your mind--decided not
to accept this work for us. I think you are determined not to meet us,
Mr. Rainsford."

"The price," said Antony, leaning fully forward, his blue eyes, whose
sight was unimpeded, fixed on Cedersholm, "must be great enough to buy
me back my lost youth."

His companion laughed gently and said indulgently, "My dear Mr.
Rainsford."

"To buy me back my loss of faith in men's honour, in human kindness, in
justice, in woman's love."

"He is a true genius," Cedersholm thought to himself, "just a bit over
the line of mental balance." And he almost envied Antony this frenzy,
for he had always judged himself too sane to be a great artist.

"It must buy me back three years of bitter struggle, of degrading manual
toil."

"My dear man," said the sculptor indulgently. "I think I understand you,
but no material price could ever do what you ask. Money, unfortunately,
has nothing to do with the past; it can take care of the future more or
less, but the past is beyond repurchase, you know."

It was growing constantly darker. The corners of the studio were deep
in shadows, and the forms of Antony's casts shone like spectres in their
white clothes; the scaffoldings looked ghostly and spirit-like.
Cedersholm sighed.

"Why have you come to me?" he heard Fairfax ask in his cutting tone, and
he understood that for some reason or other this stranger was purposely
impolite and unfriendly to him. He had not even found Fairfax's face
familiar. There he sat before Antony, small, insignificant. How often he
had crossed Tony's mind in some ugly dream when he had longed to crush
him like a reptile. Now that he stood before him in flesh and blood it
was astonishing to Fairfax to see how little real he was.

"I have been abs