of the opposite seat. His
brows were closely knit in thought. He was evolving a plan.

Duska sat with her elbow on the sill of the compartment window, her
chin on her gloved hand, her eyes gazing out, vague and unseeing. Yet,
she loved beauty, and just outside the panes there was beauty drawn to
a scale of grandeur.

They were climbing, behind the double-header of engines, up where it
seemed that one could reach out and touch the close-hanging clouds,
into tunnels and out of tunnels, through St. Gothard's Pass and on
where the Swiss Alps reached up into the fog that veiled the summits.
The mountain torrents came roaring down, to beat their green water
into swirling foam, and dash over the lower rocks like frenzied
mill-races. Her eyes did not wake to a sparkle at sight of the quaint
chalets which seemed to stagger under huge roof slabs of rugged slate.
She did not even notice how they perched high on seemingly
unattainable crags like stranded arks on Helvetian Ararats.

Each tunnel was the darkness between changed tableaux, and the mouth
of each offered a new and more wonderful picture. The car-windows
framed glimpses of Lake Como, Lake Lugano, and valleys far beneath
where villages were only a jumble of toy blocks; yet, all these things
did not change the utter weariness of Duska's eyes where enthusiasm
usually dwelt, or tempt Steele's fixity of gaze from the lace "tidy."

At Lucerne, his thinking found expression in a lengthy telegram to
Paris. The Milan exhibit had opened up a new channel for speculation.
If Saxon's pictures were being pirated and sold as Marston's, there
was no one upon whom suspicion would fall more naturally than the
unscrupulous St. John, Marston's factor in Paris. Steele vaguely
remembered the Englishman with his petty pride for his stewardship,
though his own art life had lain in circles that rarely intercepted
that of the Marston cult even at its outer rim. If this fraud were
being practiced, its author was probably swindling both artists, and
the appearance of either of them in Paris might drive St. John to
desperate means of self-protection.

The conversion of the rooms formerly occupied by Marston into a school
had been St. John's doing. This _atelier_ was in the house where St.
John himself lived, and the Kentuckian knew that, unless he had moved
his lodgings, he could still be found there, as could the very minor
"academy" of Marston-idolizers, with their none-too-exalted
instructor