Among MacGregor's intimates who shared the secret of a knock which admitted them at all hours, but who, busy men themselves, came oftenest after the north light failed, was a sculptor named Karl Richter. This man's specialty was the American Indian, but he also had known the Arab at first-hand, and Africa in one or another of its myriad phases was ever the topic when he and MacGregor foregathered. Listening to their talk, Jean came to visualize the bronze-skinned folk, the vivid market-places, the wild music of hautboys and tom-toms, the gardens of fig and olive and orange and palm, the waysides thicketed with bamboo, tamarisk, or scarlet geranium, and the desert,--above all, the mysterious, terrible, beautiful desert,--as things which her own senses had known. It chanced one day that they spoke of camels and, as often, began to argue; and that Richter, to prove his point, whipped from his pocket a lump of modeling wax, which, under his wonderful fingers, became in a twinkling a striking counterfeit of the beast itself. It could not have been more than an inch in height, but it was a very camel, stubborn, complaining, alive. MacGregor confuted, the sculptor annihilated the little animal with a careless pinch, tossed the wax aside, and soon after went his way. Dissatisfied with his work, MacGregor presently caught his canvas from the easel, and, laying it prone upon the floor, began by shifting strips of card-board to hunt the truer composition. Jean, left to herself, took up the discarded wax, tried vainly to coax back the vanished camel, and then amused herself with a conception of her own. So absorbed did she become that MacGregor finished his experiments unheeded, and, receiving no answer to a question, still unregarded came and peered over her shoulder. "Great Jupiter Pluvius!" he exclaimed. Jean whirled about. "How you startled me!" she said. "It's nothing to the way you've startled me. Where did you see that head you've modeled?" "Oh, this?" She tried to put the wax away. "It's nothing--only a baby in our block." MacGregor pounced upon the model and bore it to the light. "Nothing! Merely a study from life, that's all! Just a trifle thrown off in your odd moments!" He turned the little head round and round, showering exclamations. "Who taught you?" he demanded, striding back. "Somebody had a finger in it besides you. There are lines here that can't be purely intuitive." "I used to watch my father." "Was he a sculptor?" "He might have been, if he'd had the chance. But he had to work at other things, and he married--" "I know, I know," MacGregor groaned. "Love in a cottage and to hell with art! But he couldn't keep his thoughts or his hands from it. He modeled when he could?" Jean nodded dreamily. "Sundays, mainly," she answered. "We used to go into the country together. He found a bed of good clay near a creek where the mint grew. I can never smell mint without remembering. I couldn't go back there after he died."