do miss Jim’s help though.  Isn’t it frightful the way he disappeared?  Where do you suppose he is?  I can’t—­I won’t—­believe that anything has happened to him.  It’s all just one of his schemes to get himself talked about.  You’ll see that he will appear again, safe and sound, when the papers stop filling their columns about him.  I know Jim Rutlidge, too well.”

Aaron King thought of those bones, picked bare by the carrion birds, at the foot of the cliff.  “It seems to be one of the mysteries of the day,” he said.  “Commonplace enough, no doubt, if one only had the key to it.”

Mrs. Taine had evidently not been in Fairlands long enough to hear the story of Sibyl’s disappearance—­for which the artist mentally gave thanks.

“I am glad for one thing,” continued the woman, her mind intent upon the main purpose of her call.  “Jim had already written a splendid criticism of your picture—­before he went away—­and I have it.  All this newspaper talk about him will only help to attract attention to what he has said about you. They are saying such nice things of him and his devotion to art, you know—­it is all bound to help you.”  She waited for his approval, and for some expression of his gratitude.

“I fear, Mrs. Taine,” he said slowly, “that you are making a mistake.”

She laughed nervously, and answered with forced gaiety.  “Not me.  I’m too old a hand at the game not to know just how far I dare or dare not go.”

“I do not mean that”—­he returned—­“I mean that I can not do my part.  I fear you are mistaken in me.”

Again, she laughed.  “What nonsense!  I like for you to be modest, of course—­that will be one of your greatest charms.  But if you are worried about the quality of your work—­forget it, my dear boy.  Once I have made you the rage, no one will stop to think whether your pictures are good or bad.  The art is not in what you do, but in how you get it before the world.  Ask Conrad Lagrange if I am not right.”

“As to that,” returned the artist, “Mr. Lagrange agrees with you, perfectly.”

“But what is this that you are doing now?  Will it be ready for the exhibition too?” She looked past him, at the big canvas; and he, watching her curiously stepped aside.

Parts of the picture were little more than sketched in, but still, line and color spoke with accusing truth the spirit of the company that had gathered at the banquet in the home on Fairlands Heights, the night of Mr. Taine’s death.  The figures were not portraits, it is true, but they expressed with striking fidelity, the lives and characters of those who had, that night, been assembled by Mrs. Taine to meet the artist.  The figure in the picture, standing with uplifted glass and drunken pose at the head of the table—­with bestial, lust-worn face, disease-shrunken limbs, and dying, licentious eyes fixed upon the beautiful girl musician—­might easily have been Mr. Taine himself.  The distinguished