ent from France for six years," continued the Swede, and
paused.... And Antony knew he was going back in his mind over the past
six years of his married life with Mary. "I returned to Paris this week,
and wandered into the Salon and stood with a crowd before your
bas-relief. I stood for quite half an hour there, I should think, and at
least one hundred men and women passed and paused as I had paused. I
listened to their comments. I saw your popularity and your power, and
saw how you touched the mass by the real beauty of real emotion, by your
expression of feeling in plastic art. This is not often achieved
nowadays, Mr. Rainsford. Sculpture is the least emotional of all the
arts; literature, painting, and music stir the emotions and bring our
tears, but that calm, sublime marble, that cold stone awes us by its
harmonious perfection. Before sculpture we are content to marvel and
worship, and in the 'Open Door' you have made us do all this and made us
weep. I do not doubt that amongst those people many had lost their own
by death." He paused. It was so dark now that the two men saw each
other's face indistinctly. In the shadows Cedersholm's form had
softened; the shadows blurred him before Fairfax's eyes; his voice was
intensely melancholy. "To every man and woman who has lost your
bas-relief is profoundly appealing. Every one of us must go through that
door. Your conception, Mr. Rainsford, and your execution are sublime."

Fairfax murmured something which Cedersholm did not make out. He paused
a moment, apparently groping in thought as he groped with his weak eyes,
and as Fairfax did not respond, he continued--

"You spoke just now of the price we must pay you, the price which you
say must buy you back--what I judge you to mean by your progress, by
these years of labour and education, by your apprenticeship to art, and,
let me say, to life. My dear man, they have already purchased for you
your present achievement, your present power. Everything we have, you
know, must be paid for. Some things are paid for in coin, and others in
flesh and blood and tears. To judge by what we know of the progress of
the world in spiritual things and in art, it is the things that are
purchased by this travail of the spirit that render eternal possessions,
the eternal impressions. No man who has not suffered as you have
apparently suffered, no man who has not walked upon thorns, could have
produced the 'Open Door.' Do not degrade the value o