“They were all more or less right, you thought?” Steven Grant’s eyes were fixed curiously on Gerald’s face, still bent over the cast. Gerald looked up. “Yes, they were right, each in his own way. You know, Stevedear, it all reminded me, in a beautifully wrong-side-out fashion, of the different witnesses in Poe’s murder story, you remember?” “You mean the one where men of different nationalities all hear an ape chattering in the dark, and not knowing in the least what it is, each one is sure it’s some language not his own?” “That’s right! The Frenchman, who doesn’t know Spanish, says it’s Spanish, the Englishman, who doesn’t understand German, says it’s German, while the Italian, who doesn’t know English, feels sure it’s English, and so on. But those people at the Museum were all so splendidly different from that! Each one wanted to guard and to claim for his own race the heritage of beauty breathing from the mask. The German, the little Italian girl, the French painter, the American art student—they were all alike in this. They found in that cast Nuremberg, Perugia, Reims, Chicago!” “‘Beats Gibson, what?’” mocked Steven Grant. “Do you think it’s a cast from nature?” asked Gerald, still intent on the face. “Perhaps a death-mask?” The other nodded. “Without doubt, a death-mask.” “But there’s nothing of the sharpness of death about it, is there? It seems a face unprofaned by earthly suffering.” Again Steven Grant gazed at his nephew, as if waiting for the eyes of young manhood to see more. “Strange,” pursued Gerald, “that a mere death-mask can mean so much to living men. There’s Fraser’s Roosevelt, and the Lincoln, and the Dante that used to be in everybody’s library, and—” A silence fell between the two. Surely Mrs. Storms, the lady who was the limit, was far from their thoughts. The dinner, that masterpiece, had faded from the foreground. “I never told you,” said Gerald, abruptly, “how I longed to make a death-mask of father, when he died there in London, away from you all. I wanted to preserve—and to show to you yourself, Stevedear!—the look of peace that came upon him. As a sculptor, I knew how, of course. Every kid studying sculpture has made casts—from life, anyway. But when mother saw what I was about, she trembled so violently I couldn’t go on, in the presence of her suffering. And _I_ trembled, too. I’ve never told you about it, because I was ashamed of my weakness, or whatever it was! Well, since then, I’ve never even _tried_ to make a death-mask! People send for me, of course, and I often go, when they seem to need a friendly presence. But it’s some moulder who does the work, not I. I can’t seem to bring myself—” He set the cast on the table beside him, still conning its planes and shadows. Again the silence of understanding enveloped uncle and nephew, until Steven Grant said, as if in answer to a question, “Well, yes; it was much the same with me. I never made but one death-mask. Just one. There was no way out.”