s the figure guarding?"

Brune and his wife glanced at one another--he gravely, she with a
confident smile.

Then he said, "I leave that to the imagination."

Dr Fane looked again at the statue, and said slowly, "You have wrought
it so finely that in this light my nerves tell me it is alive."

Mrs Brune looked triumphant.

"All the world would feel so if they could see it," she said; "but it is
not to be exhibited. That is our fancy--his and mine. And now I will
leave you together for a few minutes. Heal him of his ills, Dr Fane,
won't you?"

She vanished through the door at the end of the studio. The two men
stood together by the hearth.

"She does not know?" Fane asked.

The other leaned his head upon his hand, which was pressed against the
oak mantelpiece.

"I am too cowardly to tell her," he said in a choked voice. "You must."

"And when?"

"To-day."

There was a silence. Then, in his gravest professional manner, Fane gave
some directions, and wrote others down, while the sculptor looked into
the dancing fire. When Fane had finished:--

"Shall I tell her now?" he asked gently.

Brune nodded without speaking. His face looked drawn and contorted as he
moved towards the door. His emotion almost strangled him, and the effort
to remain calm put a strain upon him that was terrible.

Gerard Fane was left alone for a moment--alone with the statue whose
personality, it seemed to him, pervaded the great studio. In its
attitude there was a meaning, in its ghost-like face and blind eyes a
resolution of intention, that took possession of his soul. He told
himself that it was lifeless, inanimate, pulseless, bloodless marble;
that it contained no heart to beat with love or hate, no soul to burn
with impulse or with agony; that its feet could never walk, its hands
never seize or slay, its lips never utter sounds of joy or menace. Then
he looked at it again, and he shuddered.

"I am over-working," he said to himself; "my nerves are beginning to
play me tricks. I must be careful."

And he forcibly turned his thoughts from the marble that could never
feel to the man and woman so tragically circumstanced, and to his
relation towards them.

A doctor is so swiftly plunged into intimacy with strangers. To the
sculptor it was as if Fane held the keys of the gates of life and death
for him; as if, during that quarter of an hour in the consulting-room,
the doctor had decided, almost of his own volition, that death sho