"It brings home to one the indestructibility of the true genius--the unquenchable fire of it! Destiny plays a strange game. She has here taken a man, and juggled with his life; battered his identity to unrecognizable fragments; set a seal on his past. Yet, his genius she could not efface. That burned through to the light--sounded on insistently through the confusion of wreck, even as that violin sounds through this hell of noises and disorder--the great unsilenced chord! The man thinks he copies another. Not so--he is merely groping to find himself. Never have I thought so deeply as since I have heard this story." For a time, Steele did not reply. To him, the personal element drowned the purely academic interest of the psychological phase in this tragedy. Suddenly, a new element of surprise struck him, and he leaned across the table, his voice full of questioning. "But you," he demanded, "you had studied under Marston. You knew him, and yet, when you saw Saxon, you had no recognition." M. Herve nodded his head with grave assent. "That was my first incredulous thought when I heard of this miracle," he admitted; "yet, only for a moment. After all, that was inevitable. They were different. Now, bearded, ill, depleted, I fancy he may once more look the man I knew--that man whose hair was a mane, and whose morbid timidity gave to his eyes a haunted and uncertain fire. When I saw Saxon, it is true I saw a man wounded and unconscious; his face covered with blood and the dirt of the street, yet he was, even so, the man of splendid physique--the new man remade by the immensity of your Western prairies--having acquired all that the man I had known lacked. He was transformed. In that, his Destiny was kind--she gave it not only to his body, but to his brush. He was before a demi-god of the palette. Now, he is the god." "Do you chance to know," asked Steele suddenly, "how his hand was pierced?" "Have you not heard that story?" the Frenchman asked. "I am regrettably responsible for that. We sought to make him build the physical man. I persuaded him to fence, though he did it badly and without enthusiasm. One evening, we were toying with sharpened foils. Partly by his carelessness and partly by my own, the blade went through his palm. For a long period, he could not paint." Frederick Marston was not at once removed from the lodgings in the _Rue St. Jacques_. Absolute rest was what he most required. When he awoke again, unless he awoke refreshed by sufficient rest, Dr. Cornish held out no hope. The strain upon enfeebled body and brain had been great, and for days he remained delirious or unconscious. Dr. Cornish was like adamant in his determination that he should be left undisturbed for a week or more.