"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 think so," Fane said. "It was impossible he should." The girl stood up. The tears were running over her face now. She turned towards the statue. "And he will be cold--cold like that!" she cried in a heart-breaking voice. "His eyes will be blind and his hands nerveless, and his voice silent." She suddenly swayed and fainted into Fane's arms. He held her a moment; and when he laid her down, a reluctance to let the slim form, lifeless though it was, slip out of his grasp, came upon him. He remembered the previous day, the doomed man going down the street--his thought as he looked from the window of his consulting-room, "I am sorry that man is going to die." Now, as he leant over the white girl, he whispered, forming the very words with his lips, "I am not sorry." And the statue seemed to bend and to listen. III Six weeks passed away. Winter was deepening. Through the gloom and fog that shrouded London, Christmas approached, wrapped in seasonable snow. The dying man had finished his work, and a strange peace stole over him. Now, when he suffered, when his body shivered and tried to shrink away, as if it felt the cold hands of death laid upon it, he looked at the completed statue, and found he could still feel joy. There had always been in his highly-strung, sensitive nature an element, so fantastic that he had ever striven to conceal it, of romance; and in his mind, affected by constant pain, by many sleepless nights, grew the curious idea that his life, as it ebbed away from him, entered into his creation. As he became feeble, he imagined that the man he had formed towered above him in more God-like strength, that light flowed into the sightless eyes, that the marble muscles were tense with vigour, that a soul was born in the thing which had been soulless. The theory, held by so many, of re-incarnation upon earth, took root in his mind, and he came to believe that, at the moment of death, he would pass into his work and live again, unconscious, it might be, of his former existence. He loved the statue as one might love a breathing man; but he seldom spoke of his fancies, even to Sydney. Only, he sometimes said to her, pointing to his work:-- "You will never be alone, unprotected, while he is there." And she tried to smile through the tears she could not always keep back.