It was another strange new sensation to be walking the familiar ways of Broad Street and Wall Street with this strange new consciousness. There were thousands of bright young men and women streaming to electrics, subways, and ferries in the first stages of commuting, and among them he bore a secret mark. Tramping along in the crowd, he felt like a soldier marching with his comrades to the trenches, but knowing himself picked for death. Luckily, his folly was not even now beyond reparation. He would get to the bank early in the morning, discover the cursed bill lying in some artfully chosen corner of the floor, and restore it to Mr. Brunt. All the same, it was a relief to get away from the fear of detection which he felt to be haunting the streets by plunging into the maw of the subway, where his identity was swallowed up. ———— At this minute, too, in the studio, Hubert Wray was leaning over Jennie Follett’s shoulder and placing before her a rough pencil sketch. "Take it away!" Jennie cried, tearfully. "I don’t want to look at it." "But, Jennie, I only wish you to see how little it involves." It was a drawing of a nude woman, her hair coiled on the top of her head, sitting very upright in a marble Byzantine chair, her knees pressed together in the manner of the Egyptian cat-goddess. On a level with her face and poised on the tips of her fingers, she held a human skull which she inspected with slanting, mysterious eyes. Wray continued to keep the sketch before Jennie, hanging over her shoulder. He was so close that she felt his breath on her neck. He could easily have pressed his lips against her amber-colored hair, and Jennie wished he would. But having long ago made up his mind that she could best be won by a system of starving out, he refrained from doing it. As, however, she persisted in brushing the sketch aside, he straightened himself up. "Then, Jennie, I’m afraid I can’t use you any more—that is, for the present. Since you won’t do it, I must get some one who will." "You could paint another kind of picture," she argued indignantly, "with me with clothes on." "You don’t understand. I’m an artist. An artist doesn’t paint the picture he chooses, but the one that’s given him to paint." "No one gave you this to paint. It isn’t a commission. It’s just your own bad mind." "I’m not ready to explain what it is. You wouldn’t understand. Something comes to you. You’ve got to obey it. This is the picture I’ve seen and which I’m obliged to do next. And, besides, it isn’t a bad mind, Jennie. The human form is the most—" "Oh, you don’t have to hand me out any hokum about the human form. It’s all very well in its place. But you fellows are crazy—the way you stick it up where it doesn’t belong. Look at that picture of Sims’s you were all so wild about—three women walking in a field, and not a stitch between them. Who’d go out like that? There’s no sense in it—"