cold me, Minerva. I have no objection to your ethics. They
are honest and frank, yours; they do not blink uncertain, like those of
Jenkins. I told you, I need some one to guide me."

And tossing over to him the sketch which she had just finished:

"See, that is the friend of whom I was speaking to you. A profound and
sure affection, which I was foolish enough to allow to be lost to me,
like the bungler I am. She it was to whom I appealed in moments of
difficulty, when a decision required to be taken, some sacrifice made. I
used to say to myself, 'What will she think of this?' just as we artists
may stop in the midst of a piece of work to refer it mentally to some
great man, one of our masters. I must have you take her place for me.
Will you?"

Paul did not answer. He was looking at the portrait of Aline. It was
she, herself to the letter; her pure profile, her mocking and kindly
mouth, and the long curl like a caress on the delicate neck. Felicia had
ceased to exist for him.

Poor Felicia, endowed with superior talents, she was indeed like those
magicians who knot and unknot the destinies of men, without possessing
any power over their own happiness.

"Will you give me this sketch?" he said in a low, quivering voice.

"Most willingly. She is nice--isn't she? Ah! her indeed, if you should
meet, love her, marry her. She is worth more than all the rest of
womankind together. And yet, failing her--failing her----"

And the beautiful sphinx, tamed, raised to him, moist and laughing, her
great eyes, in which an enigma had ceased to be indecipherable.

THE EXHIBITION

"SUPERB!"

"A tremendous success! Barye has never done anything so good before."

"And the bust of the Nabob! What a marvel. How happy Constance Crenmitz
is! Look at her trotting about!"

"What! That little old lady in the ermine cape is the Crenmitz? I
thought she had been dead twenty years ago."

Oh, no! Very much alive, on the contrary. Delighted, made young again
by the triumph of her goddaughter, who had made what is decidedly the
success of the exhibition, she passes about among the crowd of artists
and fashionable people, who, wedged together and stifling themselves in
order to get a look at the two points where the works sent by Felicia
are exhibited, form as it were two solid masses of black backs and
jumbled dresses. Constance, ordinarily so timid, edges her way into the
front rank, listens to the discussions, catches, as they fly