“Your uncle is the best and truest man I have ever met,” said he. “And he loves you dearly and you love him—and with love ingratitude can’t exist. Tell him whatever you find in your heart. But there is one thing you need never tell him—what you saw in the Rue Maugrabine last night. I have done so already. In this way there will be nothing secret between you.” She sat with tense young face, looking at her hands. Again she saw the squalid virago. She would see her till her dying day. To no one on earth could she speak of her. Fortinbras rose, kissed her on the forehead and went forth to his day’s work of dealing out happiness to a clamouring world. CHAPTER XIII LUCILLA MERRITON had much money, a kind heart and a pretty little talent in painting. The last secured her admittance to the circle of art-students round about the Rue Bonaparte, the second made her popular among them and the money enabled her to obey any reasonable dictate of the kind heart aforesaid. When those who were her intimates, mainly hard-working and none too opulent English girls, took her to task for her luxurious way of living, and pointed out that it was not in keeping with the Spartan, makeshift traditions of the Latin Quarter, and that it differentiated her too much from her fellows, she replied, with the frankness of her country, first, that she saw no sense in pretending to be other than she was, second, that in the atmosphere of luxury to which she had been born, she was herself, for whatever that self was worth; and thirdly, that any masquerading as a liver of the simple life would choke all the agreeable qualities out of her. When, looking round her amateur studio, they objected that she did not take her art seriously, she cordially agreed. “I take what you call my art,” she would say, “just as it suits me. I can command too many things in the world for me to sacrifice them to the mediocre result I can get out of a paint-brush and a bit of canvas. I shall never need paint for money, and if I did I’m sure I shouldn’t earn any. But I love painting for its own sake, and I have enough talent to make it worth while to have good instruction in technique, so that my pictures shall more or less satisfy myself and not set my friends’ teeth on edge. And that’s why I’m here.”