"Ah, that is the question," said Quarles. "I have my doubts."
"She is safer dead, at any rate, if only half they say of her is true,"
Forbes returned.
"How came she to sit for you?" I asked.
"Vanity. I was introduced to her one night at an Artists' Ball—the Albert Hall affair, you know—and I told her she had the figure of a Venus. I was consciously playing on her vanity for a purpose. In the thing I have done for the Agricultural Institute there is a recumbent figure, and I wanted the perfect model for it. The right woman is more difficult to get than you would imagine. Of course she agreed with me as to the perfectness of her figure, and then I began to doubt it. That settled the business. She fell into my trap and agreed to be the model."
"Posing in the nude?" I asked.
"Oh, that did not trouble her at all," answered Forbes. "I shouldn't be surprised if she had been a model in Paris studios before she blossomed out as a dancer. She spoke Russian, but I am inclined to think France had the honor of giving her birth. In return for her complaisance I promised to do a portrait bust of her for herself. That is it. If she is alive and comes to claim it I shall have to do her another one."
"She was evidently a very beautiful woman," said Quarles, glancing in the direction of the bust.
"Beautiful and bad, I fancy. Curiously enough, I did not hear of her disappearance until I telephoned to her flat two days after it had happened. She had broken an appointment to give me a final sitting, and I wanted to know why she hadn't come."
"Was the final sitting for the Agricultural group?" Quarles asked.
"No; for the bust there. I had to leave it as it was, but there is something in the line of the mouth which does not please me. What has become of her, do you suppose?"