her head, as if in assent. She stood a moment, then she
turned her tearless eyes to him, and said:--

"Why could not you save him?"

"Because I am human," Fane answered.

"And we did not say good-bye," she said.

Fane was strung up. Conflicting feelings found a wild playground in his
soul. His nerves were in a state of abnormal excitement, and something
seemed to let go in him--the something that holds us back, normally,
from mad follies. He suddenly caught Sydney's hand, and in a choked
voice said:--

"He is dead. Think a little of the living."

She looked at him, wondering.

"Think of the living that love you. He neither hates nor loves any more.
Sydney! Sydney!"

As she understood his meaning she wrung her hand out of his, and said,
as one trying to clear the road for reason:--

"You love me, and he bought you to keep him alive. Why, then--"

A sick, white change came over her face.

"Sydney! Sydney!" he said.

"Why, then he bought death from you. Ah!"

She put her hand on the bell, and kept it there till the servant hurried
in.

"Show Dr Fane out," she said. "He will not come here again."

And Fane, seeing the uselessness of protest, ready to strike himself for
his folly, went without a word. Only, as he went, he cast one look at
the statue. Was there not the flicker of a smile in its marble eyes?

IV

People said Dr Gerard Fane was over-working, that he was not himself.
His manner to patients was sometimes very strange, brusque, impatient,
intolerant. A brutality stole over him, and impressed the world that
went to him for healing very unfavourably. The ills of humanity rendered
him now sarcastic instead of pitiful, a fatal attitude of mind for a
physician to adopt; and he was even known to pronounce on sufferers
sentence of death with a callous indifference that was inhuman as well
as impolitic. As the weeks went by, his reception-room became less
crowded than of old. There were even moments in his day when he had
leisure to sit down and think, to give a rein to his mood of impotent
misery and despair. Sydney had never consented to receive him again.
Woman-like--for she could be extravagantly yet calmly unreasonable--she
had clung to the idea that Fane had hastened, if not actually brought
about, her husband's death by his treatment. She made no accusation. She
simply closed her doors upon him. She had a horror of him, which never
left her.

Again and again Fane called. She was always den