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was as insistent as Mrs. Brant on the duty of "business as usual." But on the young man's lips the phrase had a different meaning; it seemed the result of that altered perspective which Campton was conscious of whenever, nowadays, he tried to see things as his son saw them. George was not indifferent, he was not callous; but he seemed to feel himself mysteriously set apart, destined to some other task for which he was passively waiting. Even the split among "The Friends of French Art" left him, despite of his admiration for Boylston, curiously unperturbed. He seemed to have taken the measure of all such ephemeral agitations, and to regard them with an indulgent pity which was worse than coldness.

"He feels that all we do is so useless," Campton said to Dastrey; "he's like a gardener watching ants rebuild their hill in the middle of a path, and knowing all the while that hill and path are going to be wiped out by his pick."

"Ah, they're all like that," Dastrey murmured.

Mme. Lebel came up to the studio every afternoon. The charcoal study had been only of her head; but for the painting Campton had seated her in her own horsehair arm-chair, her smoky lamp beside her, her sewing in her lap. More than ever he saw in the wise old face something typical of its race and class: the obstinate French gift, as some one had put it, of mak-