d was not
on the modelling stool, and not seeing it there, he hoped that the
group had been stolen, anything were better than that it should have
been destroyed. But this is what had happened: the group, now a mere
lump of clay, lay on the floor, and the modelling stand lay beside it.

"I cannot think," said the charwoman, "who has done this. It was a
wicked thing to do. Oh, sir, they have broken this beautiful statue
that you had in the Exhibition last year," and she picked up the broken
fragments of a sleeping girl.

"That doesn't matter," said Rodney. "My group is gone."

"But that, sir, was only in the clay. May I be helping you to pick it
up, sir? It is not broken altogether perhaps."

Rodney waved her aside. He was pale and he could not speak, and was
trembling. He had not the courage to untie the cloths, for he knew
there was nothing underneath but clay, and his manner was so strange
that the charwoman was frightened. He stood like one dazed by a dream.
He could not believe in reality, it was too mad, too discordant, too
much like a nightmare. He had only finished the group yesterday!

He still called it his Virgin and Child, but it had never been a Virgin
and Child in the sense suggested by the capital letters, for he had not
yet put on the drapery that would convert a naked girl and her baby
into the Virgin and Child. He had of course modelled his group in the
nude first, and Harding, who had been with him the night before last,
had liked it much better than anything he had done, Harding had said
that he must not cover it with draperies, that he must keep it for
himself, a naked girl playing with a baby, a piece of paganism. The
girl's head was not modelled when Harding had seen it. It was the
conventional Virgin's head, but Harding had said that he must send for
his model and put his model's head upon it. He had taken Harding's
advice and had sent for Lucy, and had put her pretty, quaint little
head upon it. He had done a portrait of Lucy. If this terrible accident
had not happened last night, the caster would have come to cast it
to-morrow, and then, following Harding's advice always, he would have
taken a "squeeze," and when he got it back to the clay again he was
going to put on a conventional head, and add the conventional
draperies, and make the group into the conventional Virgin and Child,
suitable to Father McCabe's cathedral.

This was the last statue he would do in Ireland. He was leaving
Irela