don't wonder you dislike this room; it's horribly cold and
depressing to me. I can't work here. I wish you could see my den in
Paris. Perhaps you will let me show it to you some day. All my happiest
days have been spent in France. I am more French than American now."

He took her hand again, and with a return to his studiedly cheerful
manner called her to witness that she had promised to come to see his
paintings. "And please remember that I am going to take you at your word
and dine with you--perhaps this very night."

"All right, come along," she replied, and went away filled with wonder
at the familiar, almost humble attitude he had assumed towards her.

He did indeed dine with them that night, and quite won the Captain to a
belief in him. "Come again," he heartily said. And the great artist
feelingly answered: "I mean to, for, strange to say, I am almost as
lonesome in this big town as anybody could be." This was a lie, but
Haney's sympathy was roused. "There'll always be an empty chair for
you," he repeated, with a feeling that he, too, was encouraging art.

Humiston pursued this game with singular and joyous skill. He talked of
the West and of politics with the Captain, and of love and art and his
essentially lonely life to Bertha. He returned often to the wish that
they might meet in Paris. "A trip abroad would do you infinite good," he
insisted. "What you need is three years of life in Paris. With your
beauty and money, and, above all, with your personal magnetism, you
could reign like a queen. I wonder that you don't go. It would be worth
more to you than any other possible schooling. I don't know of anything
in this world that would give me greater pleasure than to show you
Paris."

Bertha's silence in face of these approaches deceived him. The throbbing
of her bosom, the fall of her eyelashes, were due to instinctive
distrust of him. That he was more dangerous than the rough miners and
cowboys of the West she could not believe, and yet she drew back in
growing fear of one who openly claimed the right to plow athwart all the
barriers of law and custom. His mind's flight was like that of the
eagle--now rising to the sun in exultation, now falling to the gray sea
to slay. At times she felt a kind of gratitude that he should be willing
to sit beside her and talk--he, so skilled, so learned, so famous.

The Chicago papers were still filled with criticism of his work and his
theories, and this discussion, as w