“They shall be delivered,” he said.
Steele stood watching St. John bow himself out, all the bravado turned to obsequiousness. Then, the Kentuckian shook his head.
“We have unearthed that conspiracy,” he said, “but we have learned nothing. To-morrow, I shall visit the studio where the Marston enthusiasts work, and see if there is anything to be learned there.”
“And I shall go with you,” the girl promptly declared.
CHAPTER XVIII
On an unimportant cross street which cuts at right angles the Boulevard St. Michel, that axis of art-student Paris, stands an old and somewhat dilapidated house, built, after the same fashion as all its neighbors, about a court, and entered by a door over which the concierge presides. This house has had other years in which it stood pretentious, with the pride of a mansion, among its peers. Now, its splendor is tarnished, its respectability is faded, and the face it presents to the street wears the gloom that comes of past glory, heightened, perhaps, by the dark-spiritedness of many tenants who have failed to enroll their names among the great.
Yet, for all its forbidding frown, its front bespeaks a certain consciousness of lingering dignity. A plate, set in the door-case, announces that the great Marston painted here a few scant years ago, and here still that more-or-less-distinguished instructor, Jean Hautecoeur, tells his pupils in the second-floor atelier how it was done.
He was telling them now. The model, who had been posed as, “Aphrodite Rising from the Foam,” was resting. She sat on the dilapidated throne amid a circle of easels. A blanket was thrown about her, from the folds of which protruded a bare and shapely arm, the hand holding lightly between two fingers the cigarette with which she beguiled her recess.