"Because," answered Grégoire slowly, with his eyes upon the shrunken, faintly whispering ashes of his pages, whereat the sparks gnawed with insatiable greed, "because, my little one, it is finished. What I have done I shall never do again. Never didst thou wholly understand--least of all in these last days when thy work absorbed thee. If one is to catch night-moths with such a tender touch, and preserve them for other men to see so carefully, that no one little glint of radiance may be missing from their wings, one has need of a clear eye and of a steady hand. Neither is mine. My father, of whom I have never spoken to thee,--my father, who left me this gift of trapping the thoughts that others see not as they fly, yet love and prize when they are caught and pinned upon the page, yet left me a companion curse,--the curse of absinthe, little Jean, that is not to be gainsaid. For as the gift was beautiful, so was it also frail, and as the curse was subtle, so was it also strong. I have seen the end--long, long. Now it is here. My work is finished. The curse has knocked at the door of my body, and, at the signal, the gift has flown forth from the window of my soul." He paused, and pausing, smiled. "Thou didst most nearly understand me, Jean," he continued, "in buying Le Pochard. For in truth, he was my brother--my twin--my soul, in the semblance of a toy! How we have laughed at him! Yet all along I have seen myself in that senseless little man of tin. Is it fanciful? Peut-être bien! But, now that he is gone, I see that I must go, too,--and in the same way, my Jean, in the same way,--with my absinthe in my hand and the key of inspiration turning uselessly in the broken spring of my heart!" He rose suddenly, with a shiver, and looked down at Jean le Gai. For an instant he touched him on the hair, and then he was gone into the night, leaving the little architect gazing, wide-eyed and mute, at the crinkling ashes of the last, unworthiest moth of all. During the days that followed, Le Pochard stood upon the mantel-corner. They no longer touched him, but left him, as it were, a monument to his own folly. There was no further trace in Grégoire's manner of the mood which had loosed his tongue on the night of his last reading. To Jean, who, in his simplicity stood ready with comfort and encouragement, he seemed to be in need of neither. Plainly, what he had said was but a phase of that strange imagination which had dictated the exquisite pathos of his "Danaé" and his "Tristan;" and this one thing little Jean had learned,--that his friend lived the moods he wrote, and that oftentimes, when what he said was seemingly most personal, he was posing for his own pen--a painter in speech, drawing from his reflection in a mirror opposite. So the vague alarm aroused by Grégoire's words died down, and Jean plunged once more into his work.