shion in a corner
of the sofa, and after a few moments of silence, Fairfax's pupil
whispered to him in a low tone--

"I can't draw anything, Cousin Antony, when you've got that look on."

Fairfax continued his work.

"It's no use, you've got the heavy look like the heavy step. Are you
angry with me?"

Not her words, but her voice made her cousin stop his drawing. In it was
a hint of the tears she hated to shed. Bella leant her elbow on the
table, rested her head in her hand and searched Fairfax's face with her
eloquent eyes. They were not like her mother's, doe-like and patient;
Bella's were dark eyes, superb and shadowy. They held something of the
Spanish mystery, caught from the strain that ran through the Carew
family from the Middle Ages, when the Carez were nobles in Andalusia.

"I am angry with myself, Bella; I am a fool."

"Oh no, you're _not_," she breathed devotedly, "you're a genius."

The tension of Fairfax's heart relaxed. The highest praise that any
woman could have found, this child, in her naivete, gave him.

"Why don't you make some figures and sell them, Cousin Antony? Are you
worried about money troubles?" She had heard these terms often.

"Yes," he said shortly, "just that."

He had gone on to sketch a head on the drawing-board, touching it
absently, and over his shoulder Bella murmured--

"Cousin Antony, it's just like me. You just draw wonderfully."

He deepened the shadows in the hair and rounded the ear, held it some
way off and looked at it.

"I wish I had some clay," he murmured.

He had brought the cast of the foot back to show it to his aunt when an
occasion should offer. It stood now in the little cabinet where Bella
and Gardiner kept their treasures.

"I went to see Mr. Cedersholm to-day," Fairfax continued, for lack of
other confidant taking the dark-eyed child; "now, if Cedersholm would
only take me up, and give me the chance to work under him, I'd soon show
him."

Bella agreed warmly. "Yes, indeed, you soon would."

CHAPTER XII

The odours of strange meats and sauces were wafted throughout the house.
Little troublesome feet pattered up and down the dingy back stairs, and
whenever Bella and Gardiner were laid hold upon they were banished. They
were inoculated with excitement and their nostrils pricked with the
delicious smells of flowers and smilax and feast meats.

Mr. Carew annually gave a banquet to some twenty New Yorkers, who he was
so generous as to th