med, whether by accident or design, from the new clothes that had
come from Marseilles. And then he laughed out suddenly in a quick,
exalted way, and tossed the apron on the bed. It was all changed,
that! He was through with the fisherman's dress, he was through with
Bernay-sur-Mer! To-night he was to dine with Bidelot and a score of
others in Marseilles, and after that in a few days it would be--Paris.

He undressed hurriedly, and began to dress again in a clean suit--but a
little slowly now, none too deftly. They were still strange to him
these clothes; but then everything was strange. The people around him
were strange. At times he felt awkward, constrained in their
presence--and at times he could laugh down at them as from a superior
height. Ay, he could laugh--they were at his feet! Only--he frowned
heavily--he could not laugh at Myrna Bliss. He was not master there!
And yet she, somehow, did not erect the barrier. It was himself that
did that--because he could not forget that behind the roguish smile in
the grey eyes might lurk the thought that, after all, he was only a
fisherman.

A fisherman! They were cheering now outside. His hands shut tightly.
A fisherman! He was no longer a fisherman! He was Jean Laparde, a
sculptor of France, a man before whom lay a path of glory, a man whom
the nation would acclaim, a man of whose future all stood in envy!
They had told him that, these men whom France had already honoured,
these men who had accepted him as more than their equal. But there was
no need for them to tell him--he knew it in his soul. None, no man,
the world itself, could hold back now the genius of Jean Laparde!

Paris! He was pacing the room now, his eyes afire. To-morrow or the
next day, when the Blisses had made their plans, Paris and fame was
his. What a life it was that now opened out before him! A place
amongst the highest, the world to resound with the name of Jean
Laparde--and those grey eyes, that bronze hair, that glorious beauty of
the American--God! he would immortalise her in clay, in bronze, in
marble.

Ay, they might well cheer while the chance was theirs, these people of
Bernay-sur-Mer! To-morrow or the next day he would be saying good-bye
to them, and--he stood suddenly still--and good-bye, too, to
Marie-Louise. The thought put a damper upon his spirits; his brows
gathered in deep furrows of impatient perplexity.

He had not seen much of Marie-Louise in the last wee