ists, his country was where he worked the best. For him now,
unless the place were a workshop, it could never be a hearthstone, and
he took satisfaction in recalling his ancestry on his mother's
side--Debaillet, or, as they called it in New Orleans, Ballet. As
Arabella Ballet his mother had been beautiful; as Mrs. Fairfax she had
given him Irish and French blood.

"Atavism," he said to Dearborn, "you cannot love this place as I do,
Bob. My grandfather escaped in the disguise of a French cook to save his
head in 1793. I seem to see his figure walking before me when I cross
the Place de la Concorde, and the shadow of the guillotine falls across
his path."

From his corner of the room Dearborn drawled, "If the substance of the
guillotine had fallen across his neck, Tony, where would you be in our
mutual history?"

Antony had asked his companion to call him Tony. He had not been able to
disassociate himself with everything that recalled the past.

Fairfax's figure as he turned was dark against the light of the window
and the room was full of the shadows of the early January twilight. He
wore a pair of velveteen breeches whose original colour might have been
a dark, rich blue. His flannel shirt (no longer red) was fastened
loosely at the neck by a soft black cravat under a rolling collar. It
was Sunday and he was working, the clay white upon his fingers and
nails. He wore an old pair of slippers, and Dearborn on a couch in a
corner watched him, a Turkish drapery wound around his shoulders, for
the big room was chilly and it smelled of clay and tobacco smoke. The
studio was an enormous attic, running the length of an hotel once of
some magnificence, now a tumble-down bit of still beautiful
architecture. The room was portioned off for the use of two people. Two
couches served in the night-time as their beds, there was a small stove
guiltless of fire, a few pieces of studio property, a skylight, a desk
covered with papers and books and manuscripts, and in the part of the
room near the window and under the skylight, Tony Fairfax, now Thomas
Rainsford, worked among his casts and drawings, amidst the barrels of
clay and plaster. To him, in spite of being almost always hungry, in
spite of the discomfort, of the constant presence and companionship of
another when he often longed for solitude, in spite of this, his domain
was a heaven. He had come into the place in June with Dearborn.

Tony had paid a year's rent in advance. He