oved his study for the tomb, and this
represented a living woman. It seemed almost to become flesh and blood
under his ardent hand. "Bella!" he called to her as he smoothed the
lovely cheek and saw the peach bloom under it.

"Little cousin," he breathed, as he touched the hair along her neck, and
remembered the wild, tangled forest that had fallen across his face when
he carried her in his arms during their childish romps. "Honey child,"
he murmured as he modelled and moulded the youthful lines of the mouth
and lips and stood yearning before them, all his heart and soul in his
hands that made before his eyes a lovely woman. She became to him the
very conception and expression of what he wanted his wife to be.

They say that men have fallen in love with that beautiful face of Bella
Carew as modelled by Fairfax.

Arch and subtle, tender and provoking, distinguished, youthful,
alluring, it is the most charming expression of young womanhood that an
artist's hand could give to the world.

"Beloved," he murmured like a man half in sleep and half awakening, and
he folded the lines of her bodice across her breast and fastened them
there by a single rose.

With a sweep of her lovely hair, with an uplift of the corners of her
beautiful lips, with the rose at her breast, Bella Carew will charm the
artistic world so long as the clay endures.

CHAPTER III

On the promenade deck of one of the big steamers, as it pushed around
into its pier, a man stood in his long overcoat, his hands in his
pockets, hoping to avoid the reporters whom he had reason to suppose
were ready to make him their prey.

He was entering New York Harbour at an early hour in the morning. It was
November, and over the river and over the city hung the golden haze. If
the lines of the objects, if the shore and buildings were crude, their
impression was not so to him. To and fro the ferries plied from shore to
shore, and their whistles and the whistles of the tugs spoke shrilly and
loudly to the morning, but there was nothing nasal or blatant to him in
the noises. He found the scene, the light of the morning, the greeting
of the city as it stirred to life, enchanting. He had gone away from it
six years ago, a broken-hearted man, and it seemed now as though he had
made his history in an incredibly short time. Down in the hold of the
boat, in their cases, reposed his sculptures, some thirty statues and
models that he had brought for his exposition in N