uld
cut short a life of work and of love. And even to Fane himself it seemed
as if his fiat had precipitated, even brought about, a tragedy that
appealed to his imagination with peculiar force. His position towards
this curiously interesting girl was strange. He had seen her for a
quarter of an hour only, and now it was his mission to cause her the
most weary pain that she might, perhaps, ever know. The opening of the
studio door startled him, and his heart, that usually beat so calmly,
throbbed almost with violence as Mrs Brune came up to him.

"What is it?" she asked, facing him, and looking him full in the eyes
with a violence of interrogation that was positively startling. "What is
it you have to tell me? Reginald says you have ordered him to keep
quiet--that you wish me to help you in--in something. Is he ill? May he
not finish his commissions?"

"He is ill," said Gerard Fane, with a straightforward frankness that
surprised himself.

She kept her eyes on his face.

"Very ill?"

"Sit down," the doctor said, taking her hands and gently putting her
into a chair.

With the rapidity of intellect peculiar to women, she heard in those
two words the whole truth. Her head drooped forward. She put out her
hands as if to implore Fane's silence.

"Don't speak," she murmured. "Don't say it; I know."

He looked away. His eyes rested on the statue that made a silent third
in their sad conference. How its attitude suggested that of a stealthy
listener, bending to hear the more distinctly! Its expressionless eyes
met his, and was there not a light in them? He knew there was not, yet
he caught himself saying mentally:--

"What does he think of this?" and wondering about the workings of a soul
that did not, could not, exist.

Presently the girl moved slightly, and said:--

"He only knew this for certain yesterday?"

"Only yesterday."

"Ah! but he must have suspected it long ago,"--she pointed towards the
statue--"when he began that."

"I don't understand," Fane said. "What can that marble have to do with
his health or illness?"

"When we first began to love each other," she said, "he began to work on
that. It was to be his marriage gift to me, my guardian angel. He told
me he would put all his soul into it, and that sometimes he fancied, if
he died before me, his soul would really enter into that statue and
watch over and guard me. 'A Silent Guardian' he has always called it.
He must have known."

"I do not thi