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Then with a last supreme effort his strong will asserted itself in a command upon his consciousness. For one intense instant, briefer than the flash of the tiniest spark, he realized everything, save that the blow or the nearness of death seemed to have dulled all sense of fear. The most vivid thought of all was the reflection that he might have been saved but for his efforts to help Ninitta.

He debated with himself whether Helen loved him or not; yet the more carefully he recalled his interview with her, the more impossible he found it to determine. But hope plucked courage out of this very uncertainty, and clung to the belief that had not Helen in her heart some affection for him, she could not have been so touched. But what of Ninitta?

Had Helen allowed Herman to break his early pledge to Ninitta, and marry his later love, it is probable that all her life would have been shadowed by a consciousness of guilt. The conscience bequeathed to her, as Fenton rightly said, by Puritan ancestors, would ever have reproached her with having come to happiness over the ruins of another woman's heart and hopes.

"I have not forgotten the man who pretended to be my friend and proved it by stealing my betrothed." "It is well that you have not forgotten," Ninitta went on calmly, but earnestly, "for I have a message from him. He charged me when he was dying," she added, crossing herself, "to give it to you with my own hands. I have been waiting for all these years, but now I am free of my promise."

The model showed a quickness of comprehension in taking the pose required, and the shoulder she bared was of so exquisite mold that Helen's keenest artistic powers were aroused. Ninitta understood the art of posing as a painter knows the use of brush and colors; she had for it an inborn capacity impossible except in the child of an art land.

"Do you remember," she asked, "that model who posed for my May, and was to come to you next week?" "Ninitta? Of course. What of her?" "That is precisely what I wish to find out," she responded. "She has changed her address, and I thought it possible you might know something of her whereabouts." "I have not seen her since the morning when she came into your studio. Doesn't Herman know?"

He started toward the boats, and at that instant he caught sight of the face of Ninitta. She was standing perfectly quiet, with her arm around one of the small pillars supporting the covering to the deck. She was fully dressed, though her head was uncovered and the rings of hair clung about her face. Fenton forgot everything else at sight of her.

But to-day Ninitta was a different woman, changed by the agony of a night into which had been compressed the bitterness of years. She had been too sharply wounded at being greeted by a hand-shake in place of the too well remembered kisses, with commonplace kind inquiries instead of an embrace, not to realize at least how entirely the relations between herself and Herman were changed.

"The truth is," she continued, hesitatingly, "I was afraid you had persuaded Ninitta to sit for the Fatima, you know you said once that she was the only model in Boston who was what you wanted." "Did I say that? What a dreadful memory you have. I should expect Grant to make a burnt sacrifice of me if I had beguiled her into such an indiscretion.

Yesterday Grant Herman would have found a woman not unlike the Ninitta of old times, tender, loving, pathetically submissive; today he was confronted by a fury, only restrained by the respect for his presence born of long habit. "Good evening!" he said gently, as he entered, his mood softened by the struggle through which he had passed in his studio.