“We thought it a sublime blasphemy in those days, but in these modern, higher-keyed times, no doubt it sounds tame enough. Anyway, it haunted me horribly; and to get rid of it, I carved it one rainy afternoon, in fine close letters like slanting rain, all around the outer edge of my cast. But times change, and we change. Thirty-five years later, when I looked the cast over, before giving it to the moulder to make the copies from, I knew that those lines no longer expressed what was in my heart. I had outgrown them. I knew that a better inscription would be, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those that trespass against us.’ But I decided to have no inscription whatever, and to let the cast carry its own message of beauty. So, with a file, and very carefully, as I thought, I erased every word of that inscription like the slanting rain. Again and again I passed my fingers over it, until I was sure it was gone. Still, I suppose I must have left some breath of that word, Forgiveness, which the students at the Museum discovered. Though for the life of me, I can’t find a trace of it!” He took up a magnifying-glass, and passed it to Gerald, who peered through it intently, all along the rim of the cast. “No word here,” said Gerald. He passed his fingers around the circling edge, as if, after all, a sculptor’s fingers were more to be trusted than a glass. “No, there’s nothing, really! The face must have told its own name. But tell me, Stevedear, if you don’t mind,—did you yourself really forgive, in the end?” Steven Grant smiled, and replaced the cast above his hearth-fire. Before answering, he rumpled Gerald’s hair, exposing the too high forehead. “Your question, my boy, makes me think of Mrs. Storms. Because, like that lady, it is not exactly a wrong ’un, but still, it comes very near the danger line.” And Gerald knew it was time to turn from the past to the present, and to talk of the dinner, that masterpiece. Besides, as Steven Grant had guessed, the younger sculptor was longing to speak of his own Anita, that most beautiful lady whose shining train he had hovered over, at the door of the glass coach. The elder man rejoiced with all his heart that there was no Emancipation group to thwart his nephew’s happiness. In honor of Gerald’s Anita, he was loyally ready to shout with the best, “Long live the Queen!” But he did not say to himself, sorrowfully, of the earlier Anita, “The Queen is dead.” He saw in his mind the face called Forgiveness. He listened to the German cabinet-maker, the French painter, the Italian girl, the American student. There were others, too, coming and going in the Museum; and what they said of the face made him think of life, not death. THE ARTIST’S BIRTHDAY