ed her, crying to her as he had
cried once before--

"Tell him how I kissed you--tell him!"

White as death, Mary Faversham pushed him from her. "For the love of
God, Tony, go!"

And he went, stumbling down the stairs. Out in Windsor the bugles for
some solemn festivity were blowing.

"The flowers of the forest are all wied away."

BOOK IV

BELLA

CHAPTER I

From the Western world he heard nothing for four years. Meanwhile he
brought his new skill, his maturer knowledge, the result of seven years'
study and creation in the workshops of masters and in his own studio, to
the sculpturing of the second tomb--the Open Door.

There were crowds around his marble in the Salon, and he mingled with
them, watching them muse, discuss, criticize, grow sad and thoughtful
before his conception of Life and Death. Some of them looked as poor Tom
Rainsford had looked, yearningly toward the door of the tomb. Others
hurried past the inscrutable beauty of the Open Door. Purely white,
stainless, slender, luminous and yet cold, Molly stood immortalized by
Antony. His conception made him famous.

He had exhibited each year with increasing success at private
exhibitions, but never at the Salon, and had been called "poseur"
because of his reluctance to expose his work in national academies. His
bas-reliefs had made him favourably known, but nothing equalled the
solemn marble that came now from his studio. Antony's work occupied some
twenty feet in the Champ de Mars.

His lame foot touched a pile of newspapers on the floor, in which the
critics spoke of him in terms he thought fulsome and ridiculous, and
they pained him while they dazzled him. He thought of Bella. He had
thought of Bella constantly of late, and there were no answers to his
questions. She would be twenty-three, a woman, married, no doubt, always
enchanting. How she had stood before his bas-relief in Albany, musing,
and her eyes had been wet when she had turned to him and asked, "Who is
it, Cousin Antony? It is perfectly beautiful, beautiful!" He would have
liked to have led Bella to his work in the Salon, and, hand-in-hand with
her, until the crowd around them should have melted away, have stood
there with her alone. From the night her inspiring little hand had
stolen into his, Bella's hand had seemed a mate for his.

"Who is it, Cousin Antony?"

Indeed, who was the woman going through the Open Door? What woman's face
and form constantly inspired hi