a light, and, with a scared face, went hesitatingly to
the studio door, paused outside and listened while the female servants
huddled in the passage.

The heavy silence succeeding the strange sound appalled them, but at
length the man thrust the door open and peered in.

The light from the candle flickered merrily upon Fane's bowed figure,
huddled face downwards upon the floor.

His neck was broken.

The statue, that was the dead sculptor's last earthly achievement, stood
as if watching over him. But it was no longer perfect and complete.

Some splinters of marble had been struck from the left breast, and among
them, on the smooth parquet, lay a bent Oriental dagger.

A BOUDOIR BOY

I

"It is so impossible to be young," Claude Melville said very wearily,
and with his little air of played-out indifference. He was smoking a
cigarette, as always, and wore a dark red smoking-suit that, he thought,
went excellently with his black eyes and swarthy complexion.

His father had been a blue-eyed Saxon giant, his mother a pretty Kentish
woman, with an apple-blossom complexion and sunny hair; yet he managed
to look exquisitely Turkish, and thought himself a clever boy for so
doing. But then he always thought himself clever. He had cultivated this
conception of himself until it had become a confirmed habit of mind. On
his head was a fez with a tassel, and he was sitting upon the hearthrug
with his long legs crossed meditatively. His room was dimly lit, and had
an aspect of divans, Attar of roses scented the air. A fire was burning,
although it was a spring evening and not cold. London roared faintly in
the distance, like a lion at a far-away evening party.

"It is so impossible to be young," Claude repeated, without emphasis. "I
was middle-aged at ten. Now I am twenty-two, and have done everything I
ought not to have done, I feel that life has become altogether
improbable. Even if I live until I am seventy--the correct age for
entering into one's dotage, I believe--I cannot expect to have a second
childhood. I have never had a first."

He sighed. It seemed so hard to be deprived of one's legal dotage.

His friend, Jimmy Haddon, looked at him and laughed. Jimmy was puffing
at a pipe. His pipe was the only one Claude ever allowed to be smoked
among his divans and his roses.

After thoroughly completing his laugh, Jimmy remarked:--

"Would you like to take a lesson in the art of being young?"

"Immensely."