paused, he wiped the moisture from his forehead with his pocket-handkerchief. "I have planned the thing with the utmost care. I have had no confederates. I even collected a few of Mr. Saxon's earlier and less effective pictures, and exhibited them beside Marston's best, so the public might compare and be convinced in its idea that the boundary between the master and the follower was the boundary between the sublime and the merely meritorious. That is all. For a year I have hesitated. When I entered this room, I realized my danger. Even in the growing twilight, I recognized the lady as the original of the portrait." "But didn't you know," questioned the girl, "that sooner or later the facts must become known--that at any time Mr. Saxon might come to Europe, and see one of his own pictures as I saw the portrait of myself in Milan?" St. John bowed his head. "I was desperate enough to take that chance," he answered, "though I safeguarded myself in many ways. My sales would invariably be to purchasers who would take their pictures to private galleries. I should only have to dispose of a few at a time. Mr. Saxon has sold many pictures in Paris under his own name, and does not know who bought them. Selling them as Marston's, though somewhat more complicated, might go on for some time--and my daughter's life can not last long. After that, nothing matters." "Have you actually sold any Saxons as Marstons heretofore?" demanded Steele. St. John hesitated for a moment, and then nodded his head. "Possibly, a half-dozen," he acknowledged, "to private collectors, where I felt it was safe." "I have no wish to be severe," Steele spoke quietly, "but those two pictures we must have. I will pay you a fair profit. For the time, at least, the matter shall go no further." St. John bowed with deep gratitude. "They shall be delivered," he said. Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head. "We have unearthed that conspiracy," he said, "but we have learned nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there." "And I shall go with you," the girl promptly declared. CHAPTER XVIII 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.