He climbed to the model's platform and seated himself as upon the previous morning, with a kind of business-like directness.

"Ready when you are," he said.

Barbara withdrew the damp cloths from the clay, looked critically from the bust to the original and back again. "My work," she said, "still looks right to me. But you don't."

Blizzard smiled.

"Yesterday," she said, "you looked as if you were suffering like," she laughed, "like the very devil. To-day you look well fed and contented. Now that won't do. Try to remember what you were thinking about when I first saw you."

At once, as a fresh slide is placed in a magic-lantern, the legless man's expression of well-being vanished, and that dark tortured look of Satan fallen which had so fired Barbara's imagination, once more possessed his features. Barbara's eyes flashed with satisfaction.

"It wasn't hard for you to remember what you were thinking about, was it?" she said.

"It was not," said Blizzard, and his voice was cold as a well-curb. "When I first saw you, I was thinking thoughts that can never be forgotten."

"Lift your chin, please," she said, "just a fraction. So. Turn your head a fraction more toward me. Good. And please don't think of anything pleasant until I tell you. Anybody can make an exact copy of a head. Expressions are the things that only lucky people can catch."

"I believe you are one of them," said Blizzard. "I believe you will catch mine--if you keep on wanting to."

"I must," she said simply.

And then for half an hour there was no sound in the studio but the long-drawn breathing of the legless man. Barbara worked in a kind of grim, exalted silence.

Meanwhile Bubbles was climbing the back stair to his bedroom, where he had left Harry, the secret-service agent, on guard over Barbara. The boy, all out of breath with haste, opened his right fist and disclosed a narrow slip of paper with writing on it.

"The minute he came out of his burrow and started uptown," said Bubbles, "and was out o' sight, I begun to spin my top up and down Marrow Lane. Rose she's moved upstairs, like she said she would."

Harry's eyes sparkled with interest 

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