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 should 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."