“No—­no,” he murmured absently; and then abruptly he said:  “Eh?  What’s that?  And what the devil do you know about it?”

“Well,” said I, in a dignified sort of way, “considering that for ten years I’ve been—­”

“Chut!...  Hold your tongue,” he said, turning away.

There he was, talking to me again, just as if I’d asked him in to bully me.  But you’ve got to be decent to a fellow when he’s in your own place; and by-and-by I asked him, but in a cold, off-hand sort of way, how his own work was going on.  He turned to me again.

“Would you like to see it?” he asked.

“Aha!” thought I, “he’s got to a sticking-point with his work!  It’s all very well,” I thought, “for you to sniff at my miniatures, my friend, but we all get stale on our work sometimes, and the fresh eye, even of a miniature-painter ...”

“I shall be glad if I can be of any help to you,” I answered, still a bit huffish, but bearing no malice.

“Then come,” he said.

We descended and crossed the timber-yard, and he held his door open for me to pass in.

It was an enormous great place, his studio, and all full of mist; and the gallery that was his bedroom was up a little staircase at the farther end.  In the middle of the floor was a tall structure of scaffolding, with a stage or two to stand on; and I could see the dim ghostly marble figure in the gloom.  It had been jacked up on a heavy base; and as it would have taken three or four men to put it into position, and scarcely a stranger had entered the yard since I had been there, I knew that the figure must have stood for a long time.  Sculpture’s weary, slow work.

Benlian was pottering about with a taper at the end of a long rod; and suddenly the overhead gas-ring burst into light.  I placed myself before the statue—­to criticise, you know.

Well, it didn’t seem to me that he needed to have turned up his nose at my ivories, for I didn’t think much of his statue—­except that it was a great, lumping, extraordinary piece of work.  It had an outstretched arm that, I remember thinking, was absolutely misshapen—­disproportioned, big enough for a giant, ridiculously out of drawing.  And as I looked at the thing this way and that, I knew that his eyes in their deep cellars never left my face for a moment.

“It’s a god,” he said by-and-by.

Then I began to tell him about that monstrous arm; but he cut me very short.

“I say it’s a god,” he interrupted, looking at me as if he would have eaten me.  “Even you, child as you are, have seen the gods men have made for themselves before this.  Half-gods they’ve made, all good or all evil (and then they’ve called them the Devil).  This is my god—­the god of good and of evil also.”

“Er—­I see,” I said, rather taken aback (but quite sure he was off his head for all that).  Then I looked at the arm again; a child could have seen how wrong it was....