od pictures hanging on the bare wall, and here and
there--on oak pedestals--two or three of the works of Sebastien Ruys,
whose very last work, not exhibited until after his death, was covered
with black gauze.

The mistress of the establishment, Felicia Ruys, daughter of the famous
sculptor, and already known to fame herself by two masterpieces, the
bust of her father and that of the Duc de Mora, stood in the centre of
the studio, at work modelling a figure. Dressed in a blue cloth
riding-habit with long folds, a scarf of China silk twisted around her
neck like a boy's cravat, her fine, black hair, gathered carelessly on
top of her little Grecian head, Felicia was working with extreme zeal,
which added to her beauty by the condensation, so to speak, the
concentration of all her features in a scrutinizing and satisfied
expression. But it changed abruptly on the doctor's arrival.

"Ah! it's you, is it?" she said brusquely, as if waking from a dream.
"Did you ring? I did not hear."

And in the ennui, the weariness that suddenly overspread that lovely
face, only the eyes retained their expression and brilliancy, eyes in
which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins Pearls was heightened by a
natural fierceness.

Oh! how humble and condescending the doctor's voice became, as he
replied:

"Your work absorbs you completely, does it not, my dear Felicia? Is it
something new that you're doing? I should say that it is very pretty."

He drew near to the still formless sketch in which a group of two
animals could be vaguely distinguished, one of them, a greyhound,
flying over the ground at a truly extraordinary pace.

"The idea came to me last night. I began to work by lamplight. My poor
Kadour doesn't find it amusing," said the girl, looking with a
caressing expression of affection at the greyhound, whose paws the
small servant was trying to separate in order to force him into the
proper pose.

Jenkins observed with a fatherly air that she did wrong to tire herself
so, and added, taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

"Let us see, I am sure that you are feverish."

At the touch of that hand Felicia had a feeling of something very like
repulsion.

"Let me alone--let me alone--your pearls can do nothing for me. When I
am not working, I am bored, bored to death, so bored that I could kill
myself; my ideas are of the color of that thick, brackish water flowing
yonder. To be just at the beginning of life and to be