The young couple, starting out in life arm-in-arm, had seen only life in his production, and he was glad. He let them go without reluctance, eager to return to his modelling, and to retouch a line in the woman's figure, for the bas-relief was still warm clay, and had not been cast in plaster, and he kept at his work until five o'clock in the afternoon, when there was another knock at his door. He bade the intruder absently "Come in," heard the door softly open and close, and the sound jarred his nerves, as did every sound at that door, and with his scalpel in his hand, turned sharply. In the door close to his shadow stood the figure of a slender young girl. There was only the space of the room between them, and even in his surprise he thought, "_Now_, there is nothing else!" "Cousin Antony," she said from the doorway where he had seen the vision, "aren't you going to speak to me? Aren't you glad to see me?" Her words were the first Fairfax had heard in the rich voice of a woman, for the child tone had changed, and there was a "timbre" now in the tone that struck the old and a new thrill. Her boldness, the bright assurance seemed gone. He thought her voice trembled. "Why don't you speak to me, Cousin Antony? Do you think I'm a _ghost_?" (A ghost!) Bella came forward as she spoke, and he saw that she wore a girlish dress, a long dress, a womanly dress. With her old affectionate gesture she held out her hand, and on her dark hair was a little red bonnet of some fashion too modish for him to find familiar, but very bewitching and becoming, and he saw that she was a lovely woman, nearly seventeen. "I lost the precious little paper you gave me, Cousin Antony, that day at church, and I only found it to-day in packing. I'm going home for the Easter holidays." He realized that she was close to him, and that she innocently lifted up her face. Fairfax bent and kissed her under the red hat on the hair. "Now," she cried, nodding at him, "I've hunted you down, tracked you to your lair, and you _can't_ escape. I want to see your work. Show me everything." But Fairfax put his hand up quickly, and before her eyes rested on the bas-relief he had let the curtain fall. "You're not an engineer any more, then, Cousin Antony?" "No, Bella." "Tell me why you ran away from us as you did? Oh!" she exclaimed, clasping her pretty hands, "I've thought over and over the questions I wanted to ask you, things I wanted to tell you, and now I forget them all. Cousin Antony, it wasn't _kind_ to leave us as you did,--Gardiner and me." He watched her as she took a chair, half-leaning on its back before his covered work. Bella's pose was graceful and elegant. Girl as she was, she was a little woman of the world. She swung her gloves between her fingers, looking up at him. "It's nearly five years, Cousin Antony." "I know it."