e room was cold.

Dearborn, excited and interested, watched with the visions of Antony's
past and the visions of his own creations for a long time. And Fairfax,
exhausted by the eventful day, troubled by it, touched by it, watched
the vision of a woman coming toward him, coming fatally toward him,
wonderfully toward him--but he was tired, and, before she had reached
him, he fell asleep.

CHAPTER VIII

Antony waited in the drawing-room of her hotel in the Avenue du Bois de
Boulogne some quarter of an hour before she came downstairs. He thought
later that she had purposely given him this time to look about and grow
accustomed to the atmosphere, to the room in which he afterward more or
less lived for several months.

There was not a false note to disturb his beauty-loving sense. He stood
waiting, on one side a long window giving on a rose garden, as he
afterward discovered, on the other a group in marble by Cedersholm. He
was studying this with interest when he heard Mrs. Faversham enter the
room. She had foreseen that he would not be likely to wear an evening
dress and she herself had put on the simplest of her frocks. But he
thought her quite dazzling, and the grace of her hands, and her welcome
as she greeted him, were divine to the young man.

"I'm so glad to see you, Mr. Rainsford."

Instantly he bent and kissed her hand. She saw him flush to his fair
hair. He felt a gratitude to her, a thankfulness, which awakened in him
immediately the strongest of emotions.

She seemed to consider him a distinguished guest. She told him that she
was going to Rome when Mr. Cedersholm came over--there would be a little
party going down to Italy.

Fairfax's eyes kindled, and in the few moments he stood with her there,
in her fragrant drawing-room, where the fire in the logs sang and
whispered and the lamp-light threw its long, fair shadows on the crimson
floors and melted in the crimson hangings, he felt that he stood with an
old friend, with some one he had known his life long and known well,
even before he had known--and there was a poignancy in his
treason--even before he had known his mother.

When the doors were thrown open and another visitor was announced, he
was jealous and regretful and glanced at Mrs. Faversham as though he
thought she had done him a wrong.

"My vife, oui," said the gentleman who came in and who was of a
nationality whose type was not yet familiar to Fairfax. "My wife is
horsed to-night