n the Sunday holiday, when Bella had told him "all
things she wanted to do were wicked."

Amongst his statues he had brought over was one lately bought by France
and presented to the Metropolitan Museum. It was the marble of a little
girl mourning over a dead blackbird. Everything in the city was
connected now with Bella Carew.

There was a sheaf of invitations on the table from well-known New
Yorkers, invitations to dinners, invitations to lecture, and he knew
that he would be taken into the kindliest heart of New York. Well, if
work can give a man what he wants, he had worked enough for it; there
was no doubt about that. It had been nearly a year since his interview
with Cedersholm. He brought with him casts and statues for the triumphal
arch in Boston, and he intended taking a studio here and continuing his
work in America, but he had no plans. In spite of his success and the
prices he could command, his thoughts and his mind were all at sea. His
personality had not yet developed to the point where he was at peace. He
knew that such peace could only come to him through the companionship of
a woman.

No commonplace woman would satisfy Fairfax now.

Money and position meant absolutely nothing to him. If Bella Carew were
a rich and brilliant heiress it would probably alienate him from her.
His need called for a woman who could work at his side with a kindred
interest, a woman who knew beauty, who loved art, whose appreciation and
criticism could not leave him cold.

What would Bella Carew, when he found her--as he should--prove herself
to be? Spoiled she was, no doubt, mistress for several years of a large
fortune, coquette, flirt; of these things he was partly sure, because
she had not married. Children with her great promise develop sometimes
into nonentities, but Bella, at sixteen, had surpassed his wildest
prophecies for her. Bella, as he had seen her on the outskirts of the
crowd, had driven him mad. He knew that it had been she; there was no
doubt about it in his mind. Now to find her, to see what she had become.

He knew that Bella, when she opened the morning papers the next day--if
she were in New York--would discover who he was. There would be
descriptions of him as a lame sculptor; there would be reproductions of
his "Open Door"; there would be the fact that he was born in New
Orleans; that he assumed the name of Rainsford. Now that he had no
longer any secret to keep, his own name, Antony Fairfax, woul