"Some weeks ago I learned that you and Daphne were to spend your Christmas at the Abbey. I prepared for the event. I had vowed that, living or dead, Daphne should minister to the success of my picture, and since I could not have the living woman, I resolved to have her dead form; it would suit my purpose equally well--perhaps better. I have learnt a little of the topography of the Abbey. A secret passage connecting this tower with the bedchambers furnished me with the ready means for carrying her off to my studio in the darkness of the night. This phial here," holding up the bottle that he had evidently removed from my breast-pocket, where I had placed it--"you have had some experience of it yourself--applied to her pretty nostrils would be an instant balm for hysterics. However, my scheme of last night miscarried--through you. Therefore you take her place. You have prevented me from adequately realising my conception of the sweet and sad death-beauty of a girl-martyr. Art demands, then, that you atone for your intervention by becoming the substitute. Behold, martyr, your attire!" he added, turning to the table and lifting up the different articles composing the Roman costume. Replacing them, he took up the ivory paw whose use had so much puzzled me. "You see this? To lacerate your naked body with--to give to its quivering white the very wounds that a lion's claws would inflict. My own invention--exclusively my own." He spoke of his projected task in as cool a tone as a scientist might use in speaking of the dissection of a dog. "You see," he continued, laying down the claw, "this is the age of realism. Nothing is now accepted in literature, art, or the drama that does not bear on its front the stamp of reality. Art, if it is to hold the mirror up to Nature, must not shrink any more than medical science from experimenting on the living frame, and analysing with delicate eye its varying phases of agony." He paused for a moment, and then, with the air of a man arriving at the end of a set oration, he said: "You now have my secret. Know, then, how I intend to produce on that canvas the dying agonies of Modestus the martyr--the picture destined to create an epoch in the history of modern art. So soon as the church-bells chime the hour of midnight you are dead. Such is Daphne's wish." "Daphne's!" I ejaculated. "Ay! She wishes for your death. She has promised to marry me to-night. Did you not know?" He spoke in so natural a tone that I could but stare fixedly at him, wondering what his motive could be in fabricating so wild a statement. My look of perplexity was so great that the artist laughed aloud. This was the first time his facial muscles had relaxed. The transition from rigidity to mobility was not an agreeable one.