been spreading his arts
thinly, you may say, to cover what he supposed was to have been a much
longer period of time. And he should have come sooner and with all his
strength to the point. There had been moments of supreme discouragement,
when, if there was to be a miracle in his life, he should have spoken.
There were to be no more of those golden moments. She would close the
studio, go away, and return by way of exercise and fresh air to a sane
and normal state of mind--a state of mind in which such a physical and
moral cripple as himself could have no place except among the
curiosities.

She stood looking steadily at the head which had come to life under her
hands. Her eyelids drooped heavily. She looked almost as if she was
falling asleep.

Blizzard watched her as a cat watches a mouse, not knowing what was best
for him to dare. Now he was for pleading his cause with all the passion
that inspired it; now for boldly claiming her as the expiation for her
father's fault; and now he was for passing over all preliminaries and
felling her with a blow of his fist.

And then she suddenly turned to him, and smiled like a very happy and
very tired child. "You've been very good to me," she said, "and so
patient! I don't know quite how to thank you. I owe you such a lot."

"Do you?" he said, his hard eyes softening and seeking hers.

She nodded slowly. "Such a lot. And there's no way of paying, or making
things up to you, is there?"

"Only one," he said.

There was quite a long silence; his eyes, flames in them, held hers,
which were troubled and childlike, and imbued the two words that he had
spoken with an unmistakable intelligence.

"Don't let me go utterly," he said, "and slip back into the pit. You
have finished the bust. If you wished you could finish the man: put him
back among the good angels.... If your father died owing money, you
couldn't rest until you had paid his debts.... I could be anything you
wished. And I could give you anything that you wanted in this world.
There is nothing I couldn't put over--with you at my side, wishing the
good deed done, the great deed--or--"

He began to tremble with the passion that was in his voice, slipped from
his chair, and began to move slowly toward her with outstretched arms,
upon his stumps of legs.

It was no mirth or any sense of the ridiculous that moved Barbara, but
fear, disgust, and horror. She backed away from him, laughing
hysterically. But he, whose sel