The Study was the scene of the most extraordinary thing he had to relate. Once when he had been lying for several days in bed, weak and fevered, he had a strong desire to go downstairs to the Study. Darkness and tea-time were near, his wife and children were out, doubtless the servant was reading something by the light of the red-hot kitchen grate. The house was silent. Slowly the invalid went down and laid his fingers on the handle of his door, which was opposite the foot of the stairs. An unusual feeling of quiet expectancy had stolen on him; nothing, he said, could have astonished him at that moment. He had, however, no idea of what he was expecting until he had opened the door to its full extent. Thus was disclosed, between his table and the window, a beautiful female figure, half sitting, half reclining, as if asleep, among a number of books which had remained on the floor during his illness. Though he had not put on his spectacles before coming down he saw perfectly, so clearly, as he said, that she seemed to gleam, as if it was still full day with her. Her beautiful long black hair was confined by a narrow fillet of gold, which made clear the loveliness of her head. He said that only Mr Torrance could describe her properly. No, he affirmed, if people smiled, it did not occur to him that the nude looked awkward near a gas-stove. Nor had she any more need of its warmth than the Elgin Marbles or the Bacchus in Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne.” Yet she was not of marble or paint, but of flesh, though he had seen nothing of the kind in his life. Her shoulders moved with her breathing, and this as well as her attitude proclaimed that she was mourning, some seconds before he heard her sob. He thought that the figure and posture were the same as those in a Greek statue which he had seen long before, in London or Paris. They had the remoteness and austerity of marble along with something delicate, transient, and alive. But if there could have been a doubt whether she was flesh or stone, there was none that she was divine. In what way she was divine he could not tell, but certainly she was, though in no visible way was she different from the women of pictures and statues. He did not feel that she would notice him. He was not shocked, or curious, but calm and still expectant. He drew a deep breath and tried to make his trembling body stand quite still by leaning against the wall to watch. He did not suppose that she had come into his room in the ordinary way. He had, on the other hand, a conviction that she had something to do with his books, that she had emerged from them or one of them. A gap in the bottom shelf, where stood the largest books, caught his eye and thrust itself forward as a cave whence she had come. Yet she was as white as Aphrodite newly risen from the unsailed ocean, and she diffused a sense of open air, of space, of the wild pure air, about her, as if she lay upon a rock at the sea edge or among mountain flowers instead of in