As he lay still and cold upon his white bed, at midnight, the great candles flaming in their high brass candlesticks, idols of the East gazing sadly down upon him, the girl, who had flung herself beside the bed, her bowed head on his chill unanswering hand, of a sudden ceased her sobbing and stood up. She bit her finger tips upon the urging of some sudden mood, gazing stealthily about the room. She was alone. She walked, with strange catlike tread, to an exquisite lacquer cabinet; opened the lock, and lifting the lid, took out a red Japanese fan. She went to the dead man’s bookshelves and took down Solignac’s last volume of sonnets--the pages were uncut. She sat down at the foot of the bed. How often she had so sat as a child! He had had such pride in her! The high flames of the great altar candles flooding her with their light, cast shadows down upon her where she crouched over the book. She gripped the handle of the fan in her long supple fingers and plucked a bright blade from out the cunningly wrought scabbard--the fan had only been in the outward seeming, most wondrously carved. The blade was a cruel one, and keen as pitilessness. She cut the pages of the book with it--and as the paper hissed its surrender to the sharp blade’s thrust she smiled. But in the smile was little mirth. Across the river, in the students’ quarter, brooding before a wood fire in the rooms of his hotel, sat Mr. Quilliam O’Flaherty Macloughlin Myre. He was worried. He had written a play, choke-full of the most obvious symbolism. It had failed. It was not even considered original--indeed, it had been condemned as being very poor Ibsen indeed. Nor had he won money out of the venture. He was sadly puzzled. Not to be original! it were not to be Quogg Myre. He searched the history of genius to find a precedent on which to act--to be original. He arose on to his splay feet, and with his awkward slovenly gait paced the room, shivered at the discomfort of his thoughts, walked to the fireplace and stood brooding at his image in the mirror above it; his hands thrust deep in his trousers pockets. His untidy colourless hair fell over his paste-coloured forehead--it was more untidy than usual, more colourless. A hank of it stood out on the back of his poll like the crest of a cockatoo. He was sickly pale. His weak puffy red lip was limp and uneasy. His long quarrelsome chin alone held firm for bouts of decision. It was his chin that fought the slacknesses of his body. How had Shakespeare and these clever fellows discovered their great art? Why should not _he_ create a school? These fellows--Shakespeare, Dickens, Balzac, Carlyle, Meredith, Sterne, and the rest--they had been just real live men, needing their dinner, sleeping o’ nights, fighting their way to fame year after year, rebuffed, sneered at, ordinary human flesh--without half his chances. What was the trick that they had discovered? Ay; what the key to their wizardry?