own life were wrapped up In them, given in exchange for
them, as though indeed she were a very part of them, and they were of
her blood and flesh.

She pressed her hands very tightly together over the key, and then
opened them and let the key lay in her palm to look at it in the
moonlight. She had seen so little in the studio, so very little! In
the three mornings she had been there, there had always been Madame
Mi-mi to fuss around her, to instruct her in her work, or, failing that
as an excuse--to gossip. And if it were not madame, then it was
Hector--and often it was both. And she had so wanted to be alone
there--it was not very much to ask, that--just to be alone there for a
little time with Jean's things around her, to be very quiet, to be
alone.

Why should she not go now? It was not a sin that she would commit. It
was only that if Father Anton knew, or Madame Garneau knew they would
not understand--but they would never know. No one would ever know.
Jean would be upstairs asleep; and Hector and his wife would be
downstairs in bed. That statue, that wonderful statue of the girl with
the drum, would be more wonderful than ever with the bright moonlight
pouring in upon it through that great glass roof of the _atelier_. She
had seen so little of it, because when she was there it was always
wrapped up in damp cloths; she had seen it only when that absurd Hector
had exhibited it to her with a patronising air as though he had
modelled it himself, making use of a flood of technical expressions of
which she did not understand a word, and of whose meaning she was quite
sure he was equally ignorant, but having heard the words around the
studio repeated them like a parrot. She had seen so little of it, when
her soul cried out to see so much. It haunted her, that statue--why,
she did not know. It was before her always--in her dreams, which were
always dreams of the salon and the _atelier_, the figure with the drum
always stood out above everything else, even though everything else,
even though the very smallest things and details there were so dear and
intimate too. Was it a sin to go and stand and look, when her heart
was so full of the longing that it would not be denied? Who was there
to say, "you went to Jean's studio at two o'clock in the morning,"
when, in the quiet and the stillness there, there would be only
herself, and that great figure with the drum, and the _bon Dieu_, who
made Jean do such wondrou