"We swindled St. John," he exclaimed. "We bought back the pictures at Saxon prices." His voice became unusually soft. "And Frederick Marston can never paint another so good as the portrait. We must set that right. Do you know--" the man laughed sheepishly--"it's rather disconcerting to find that one has spent seven years in self-worship?" Steele smiled with relief at the change of subject. "Is that the sensation of being deified?" he demanded. "Does one simply feel that Olympus is drawn down to sea level?" Shortly after, Marston sent a brief note to Duska. "I shall say little," he wrote. "I can't be sure you will give me a hearing, but also I can not go on until I have begged it. I can not bear that any report shall reach you until I have myself reported. My only comfort is that I concealed nothing that I had the knowledge to tell you. There is now no blank in my life, and yet it is all blank, and must remain blank unless I can come to you. I am free to speak, and, if you give it to me, no one else can deny me the right to speak. All that I said on that night when a certain garden was bathed in the moon is more true now than then, and now I speak with full knowledge. Can you forgive everything?" And the girl reading the letter let it drop in her lap, and looked out through her window across the dazzling whiteness of the _Promenade des Anglais_ to the purple Mediterranean. Once more, her eyes lighted from deep cobalt to violet. "But there was nothing to forgive," she softly told the sea. CHAPTER XXI When, a month later, Frederick Marston went to the hotel on the _Promenade des Anglais_ at Nice, it was a much improved and rejuvenated man as compared with the wasted creature who had opened the closed door of the "academy" in the _Quartier Latin_, and had dropped the key on the floor. Although still a trifle gaunt, he was much the same person who, almost a year before, had clung to the pickets at Churchill Downs, and halted in his view of a two-year-old finish. Just as the raw air of the north had given place to the wooing softness of the Riviera, and the wet blankets of haze over the gardens of the Tuileries to the golden sunlight of the flower-decked south, so he had come again out of winter into spring, and the final result of his life's equation was the man that had been Saxon, untouched by the old Marston.