for his composition
and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of
the glow--the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging
one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and
God--all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there
in the two hands.

So they had been for six hours, and it would soon be morning. The large,
bare room, however, was still possessed by night, and the city outside
was at its lowest ebb of life, almost soundless. Against the skylight the
winter stars seemed to be pressing; the sky was laid across the panes of
glass like a purple cloth in which sparks burned.

Suddenly and with strength Arundel sat up. Sheila rose with him, drawing
up his hand in hers to her heart.

"Keep looking at the stars, Sheila," he said with thrilling emphasis, and
widened his eyes at the visible host of them. Then he looked down at her;
his eyes shone as though they had caught a reflection from the myriad
lights. "It is a good old world," he said heartily in a warm and human
voice, and he smiled his smile of everyday good-fellowship.

Sheila thanked God for his return, and on the very instant he was gone.
He dropped back, and there were no more difficult breaths.

Sheila, alone there in the garret studio above the city, cried to her
father and shook him, till, in very terror of her own frenzy in the face
of his stillness, she grew calm and laid herself down beside him, put his
dead arm around her, nestled her head against his shoulder. She was
seventeen years old, left alone and penniless in the old world that he
had just pronounced so good. She lay there staring at the stars till they
faded, and the cold, clear eye of day looked down into the room.

CHAPTER II

SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE

Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid
successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of
good or ill. Certainly he did not look his history. He was
stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always
turning and twisting a big emerald. He dressed quietly, almost correctly,
but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of
his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not
become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his
long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal
wrinkle halfway betwee