On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the Boulevard St. Michel, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the concierge presides. This house has had other years in which it stood pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory, heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have failed to enroll their names among the great.

Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case, announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago, and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor atelier how it was done.

He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, “Aphrodite Rising from the Foam,” was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her recess.

The master, looking about on the many industrious, if not intellectual, faces, was discoursing on Marston’s feeling for values.

“He did not learn it,” declared M. Hautecoeur: “he was born with it. He did not acquire it: he evolved it. A faulty value caused him pain as a false note causes pain to the true musician.” Then, realizing that this was dangerous doctrine from the lips of one who was endeavoring to instill the quality into others, born with less gifted natures, he hastened to amend. “Yet, other masters, less facile, have gained by study what they lacked by heritage.” The room was bare except for its accessories of art. A few well-chosen casts hung about the walls. Many unmounted canvases were stacked in the corners, the floors were chalk-marked where easel-positions had been recorded; charcoal fragments crunched underfoot when one walked across the boards. From the sky-light—for the right of the building had only two floors—fell a flood of afternoon light, filtering through accumulated dust and soot. The door upon the outer hall was latched. The students, bizarre and unkempt in the bohemianism of their cult, mixed colors on their palettes as they listened. In their little world of narrow horizons, the discourse was like a prophet’s eulogy of a god.

As the master, his huge figure somewhat grotesque in its long, paint-smeared blouse and cap, stood delivering his lecture with much eloquence of gesture, he was interrupted by a rap on the door. Jacques du Bois, whose easel stood nearest the threshold, reluctantly took his pipe from his teeth, and turned the knob with a scowl for the interruption. For a moment, he stood talking through the slit with a gentleman in the hall-way, his eyes meanwhile studying with side-glances the lady who stood behind the gentleman. Then, he bowed and closed the door.

“Someone wishes a word with M. Hautecoeur,” he announced.

The master stepped importantly into the hall, and Steele introduced himself. M. Hautecoeur declared that he quite well remembered monsieur and his excellent painting. He bowed to mademoiselle with unwieldly gallantry.

“Mr. Robert Saxon,” began the American, “is, I believe, one of the most distinguished of the followers of Frederick Marston. Miss Filson and I are both friends of Mr. Saxon, and, while in Paris, we wished to visit the shrine of the Marston school. We have taken the liberty of coming here. Is it possible to admit us?”

The instructor looked cautiously into the atelier, satisfied himself that the model had not resumed her throne and nudity, then flung back the door with a ceremonious sweep. Steele, familiar with such surroundings, cast only a casual glance about the interior. It was like many of the smaller schools in which he had himself painted. To the girl, who had never seen a life-class at work, it was stepping into a new world. Her eyes wandered about the walls, and came back to the faces.

“I have never had the honor of meeting your friend, Monsieur Saxon,” declared the instructor in English. “But his reputation has crossed the sea! I have had the pleasure of seeing several of his canvases. There is none of us following in the footsteps of Marston who would not feel his life crowned with high success, had he come as close as Saxon to grasping the secret that made Marston Marston. Your great country should be proud of him.”

Steele smiled.

“Our country could also claim Marston. You forget that, monsieur.”

The instructor spread his hands in a deprecating gesture.

“Ah, mon ami, that is debatable. True, your country gave him birth, but it was France that gave him his art.”

“Did you know,” suggested Steele, “that some of the unsigned Saxon pictures have passed competent critics as the work of Marston?”

Hautecoeur lifted his heavy brows.

“Impossible, monsieur,” he protested; “quite impossible! It is the master’s boast that any man who can pass a painting as a Marston has his invitation to do so. He never signs a canvas—it is unnecessary—his stroke—his treatment—these are sufficient signature. I do not belittle the art of your friend,” he hastened to explain, “but there is a certain—what shall I say?—a certain individualism about the work of this greatest of moderns which is inimitable. One must indeed be much the novice to be misled. Yet, I grant you there was one quality the master himself did not formerly possess which the American grasped from the beginning.”

“His virility of touch?” inquired Steele.

“Just so! Your man’s art is broader, perhaps stronger. That difference is not merely one of feeling: it is more. The American’s style was the outgrowth of the bigness of your vast spaces—of the broad spirit of your great country—of the pride that comes to a man in the consciousness of physical power and currents of red blood! Marston was the creature of a confined life, bounded by walls. He was self-absorbed, morbid, anemic. To be the perfect artist, he needed only to be the perfect animal! He did not understand that. He disliked physical effort. He felt that something eluded him, and he fought for it with brush and mahlstick. He should have used the Alpinstock or the snow-shoe.” Hautecoeur was talking with an enthused fervor that swept him into metaphor.

“Yet—” Steele was secretly sounding his way toward the end he sought—“yet, the latter pictures of Marston have that same quality.”

“Precisely. I would in a moment more have spoken of that. I have my theory. Since leaving Paris, I believe Marston has gone perhaps into the Alps, perhaps into other countries, and built into himself the thing we urged upon him—the robust vision.”

The girl spoke for the first time, putting, after the fashion of the uninitiated, the question which, the more learned hesitate to propound: “What is this thing you call the secret? What is it that makes the difference?”

“Ah, mademoiselle, if I knew that!” The instructor sighed as he smiled. “How says the English Fitzgerald? ‘A hair perhaps divides the false and true.’ Had Marston had the making of the famous epigram, he would not have said he mixed his paints with brains. Rather would he have confessed, he mixed them with ideals.”

“But I fear we delay the posing,” suggested Steele, moving, with sudden apprehension, toward the door.

“I assure you, no!” prevaricated the teacher, with instant readiness. “It is a wearying pose. The model will require a longer rest than the usual. Will not mademoiselle permit me to show her those Marston canvases we are fortunate enough to have here? Perhaps, she will then understand why I find it impossible to answer her question.”

When Captain Paul Harris had set his course to France with a slow, long voyage ahead, his shanghaied passenger had gone from stunned unconsciousness into the longer and more complicated helplessness of brain-fever. There was a brushing of shoulders with death. There were fever and unconsciousness and delirium, and through each phase Dr. Cornish, late of the Foreign Legion, brought his patient with studious care—through all, that is, save the brain fog. Then, as the vessel drew to the end of the voyage, the physical illness appeared to be conquered, yet the awakening had been only that of nerves and bodily organs. The center of life, the mind, was as remote and incommunicable as though the thought nerves had been paralyzed. Saxon was like a country whose outer life is normal, but whose capital is cut off and whose government is supine. The physician, studying with absorbed interest, struggled to complete the awakening. Unless it should be complete, it were much better that the man had died, for, when the vessel dropped her anchor at Havre, the captain led ashore a man who in the parlance of the peasants was a poor “innocent,” a human blank-book in a binding once handsome, now worn, with nothing inscribed on its pages. For a time, the physician and skipper were puzzled as to the next step. The physician was confident that the eyes, which gazed blankly out from a face now bearded and emaciated, would eventually regain their former light of intelligence. He did not believe that this helpless creature—who had been, when he first saw him in Puerto Frio, despite blood-discolored face and limp unconsciousness, so perfect a figure of a man—had passed into permanent darkness. The light would again dawn, possibly at first in fitful waverings and flashes through the fog. If only there could be some familiar scene or thing to suggest the past! But, unfortunately, all that lay across the world. So, they decided to take him to Paris, and ensconce him in Captain Harris’ modest lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques, and, inasmuch as the captain’s lodgings were shared by no one, and his landlady was a kindly soul, Dr. Cornish also resolved to go there. For a few weeks, the sailor was to be home from the sea, and meant to spend his holiday in the capital. As for the physician, he was just now unattached. He had hoped to be in charge of a government’s work of health and sanitation. Instead, he was idle, and could afford to remain and study an unusual condition. He certainly could not abandon this anonymous creature whom fate had thrust upon his keeping. Now, six weeks after his accident, Saxon sat alone in the modest apartment of the lodgings in the Rue St. Jacques. Since his arrival in Paris, the walls of that room and the court in the center of the house had been the boundaries of his world. He had not seen beyond them. He had been physically weak and languid, mentally void. They had attempted to persuade him to move about, but his apathy had been insuperable. Sometimes, he wandered about the court like a small child. He had no speech. Often, he fingered a rusty key as a baby fingers a rattle. On the day that Steele and Duska had gone to the academy of M. Hautecoeur, Dr. Cornish and Paul Harris had left the lodgings for a time, and Saxon sat as usual at a window, looking absently out on the court.

In its center stood a stone jardiniÈre, now empty. About it was the flagged area, also empty. In front was the street-door—closed. Saxon looked out with the opaque stare of pupils that admit no images to the brain. They were as empty as the stone jar. Possibly, the sun, borrowing some of the warmth of the spent summer, made a vague appeal to animal instinct; possibly, the first ray of mental dawn was breaking. At all events, Saxon rose heavily, and made his way into the area.

At last, he wandered to the street-door. It happened to be closed, but the concierge stood near.

“Cordon?” inquired the porter, with a smile. It is the universal word with which lodgers in such abodes summon the guardian of the gate to let them in or out.

Saxon looked up, and across the hitherto unbroken vacancy of his pupils flickered a disturbed, puzzled tremor of mental groping.

He opened his thin lips, closed them again, then smiled, and said with perfect distinctness:

“Cordon, s’il vous plait.”

The concierge knew only that monsieur was an invalid. In his next question was nothing more than simple Gallic courtesy.

“Est-ce que monsieur va mieux aujour d’hui?” Once more, Saxon’s lips hesitated, then mechanically moved.

“Oui, merci,” he responded.

The man who found himself standing aimlessly on the sidewalk of the Rue St. Jacques, was a man clothed in an old and ill-fitting suit of Captain Harris’ clothes. He was long-haired, hollow-cheeked and bearded like a pirate. At last, he hesitatingly turned and wandered away at random. About him lay Paris and the world, but Paris and the world were to him things without names or meaning.

His unguided steps carried him to the banks of the Seine, and finally he stood on the island, gazing without comprehension at the square towers of NÔtre Dame, his brows strangely puckered as his eyes picked out the carvings of the “Last Judgment” and the Galerie des Rois.

He shook his head dully, and, turning once more, went on without purpose until at the end of much wandering he again halted. This time, he had before him the PanthÉon’s entrance, and confronting him on its pedestal sat a human figure in bronze. It was Rodin’s unspeakably melancholy conception, “le Penseur,” and it might have stood for Saxon’s self as it half-crouched with limbs tense and brows drawn in, in the agony of brooding thought-travail.

Then, Saxon’s head came up, and into his eyes stole a confused groping, as though reason’s tentacles were struggling out blindly for something upon which to lay hold. With such a motion perhaps, the prehistoric man-creature may have thrown up his chin at the bursting into being of thought’s first coherent germ. But from “le Penseur” Saxon turned away with a futile shake of his head to resume his wanderings.

Finally, in a narrow cross street, he halted once more, and looked about him with a consciousness of vast weariness. He had traversed the length of many blocks in his aimlessness, crossing and recrossing his own course, and he was still feeble from long days of illness and inertia.

Suddenly, he raised his head, and his lips, which had been half-parted in the manner of lips not obeying a positive brain, closed in a firm line that seemed to make his chin and jaw take on a stronger contour. He drew his brows together as he stood studying the door before him, and his pupils were deeply vague and perplexed. But it was a different perplexity. The vacuity was gone.

Automatically, one thin hand went into the trousers-pocket, and came out clutching a rusty key. For another moment, he stood regarding the thing, turning it over in his fingers. Then, he laughed, and drew back his sagging shoulders. With the gesture, he threw away all imbecility, and followed the inexorable call of some impulse which he could not yet fully understand, but which was neither vague nor haphazard.

At that moment, Dr. Cornish, chancing to glance up from his course a block away, stopped dumfounded at the sight of his patient. When he had gathered his senses, and looked again, the patient had disappeared.

Saxon walked a few steps further, turned into an open street-door, passed the concierge without a word, and toilsomely, but with a purposeful tread, mounted the narrow, ill-lighted stairs. At the turning where strangers usually stumbled, he lifted his foot clear for the longer stride, yet he had not glanced down.

For just a moment, he paused for breath in the hall, upon which opened several doors identical in appearance. Without hesitation, he fitted the ancient key into an equally ancient lock, opened the door, and entered.

At the click of the thrown tumbler of the lock, some of the occupants of the place glanced up. They saw the door swing wide, and frame between its jambs a tall, thin man, who stood unsteadily supporting himself against the case. The black-bearded face was flushed with a burning fever, but the eyes that looked out from under the heavy brows were wide awake and intelligent.

“But Marston will one day return to us,” Monsieur Hautecoeur was declaring to Steele and the girl, who, with backs to the door, were studying a picture on the wall. “He will return, and then——”

The instructor had caught the sound of the opening door, and he half-turned his head to cast a side glance in its direction. His words died suddenly on his lips. His pose became petrified; his features transfixed with astonishment. His rigid fixity of face and figure froze the watching students into answering tenseness. Even the blanket-wrapped model held a freshly lighted cigarette poised half-way to her lips. Then, the man in the door took an unsteady step forward, and from his trembling fingers the key fell to the floor, where in the dead stillness it seemed to strike with a crash. The girl and Steele wheeled. At that moment, the lips of the bearded face moved, and from them came the announcement:

“Me voici, je viens d’arriver.”

The voice broke the hypnotic suspense of the silence as a pin-point snaps a toy balloon.

Hautecoeur sprang excitedly forward.

“Marston! Marston has returned!” he shouted, in a great voice that echoed against the sky-light.

As the man stepped forward, he staggered slightly, and would have fallen had he not been already folded in the giant embrace of the lesser master.

Duska stood as white as the fresh sheets of drawing-paper at her feet. Her fingers spasmodically clenched and opened at her sides, and from her teeth, biting into the lower lip, her breathing came in gasps. The walls seemed to race in circles, and it was with half-realization that she heard Steele calling the man, wildly demanding recognition.

The newcomer was leaning heavily on Hautecoeur’s arm. He did not appear to notice Steele, but his gaze met and held the girl’s pallid face and the intensely anguished eyes that looked into his. For an instant, they stood facing each other, neither speaking; then, in a voice of polite concern, the tall man said:

“Mademoiselle is ill!” There was no note of recognition—only, the solicitous tone of any man who sees a woman who is obviously suffering.

Duska raised her chin. Her throat gave a convulsive jerk, but she only caught her lip more tightly between her teeth, so that a moment later, when she spoke, there were purplish indentations on its almost bloodless line.

She half-turned to Steele. Her voice was an utterly hopeless whisper, but as steady as Marston’s had been. “For God’s sake,” she said, “take me home!”

At the door, they encountered the excited physician, who stumbled against them with a mumbled apology as he burst into the atelier.