“I’ll get another in the morning,” I cried.

“No,” he answered.  “I know something better than that.  Have a cab here by ten o’clock in the morning, and we’ll go somewhere.”

By half-past ten the next morning we had driven to a large hospital, and had gone down a lot of steps and along corridors to a basement room.  There was a stretcher couch in the middle of the room, and all manner of queer appliances, frames of ground glass, tubes of glass blown into extraordinary shapes, a dynamo, and a lot of other things all about.  A couple of doctors were there too, and Benlian was talking to them.

“We’ll try my hand first,” Benlian said by-and-by.

He advanced to the couch, and put his hand under one of the frames of ground glass.  One of the doctors did something in a corner.  A harsh crackling filled the room, and an unearthly, fluorescent light shot and flooded across the frame where Benlian’s hand was.  The two doctors looked, and then started back.  One of them gave a cry.  He was sickly white.

“Put me on the couch,” said Benlian.

I and the doctor who was not ill lifted him on the canvas stretcher.  The green-gleaming frame of fluctuating light was passed over the whole of his body.  Then the doctor ran to a telephone and called a colleague....

We spent the morning there, with dozens of doctors coming and going.  Then we left.  All the way home in the cab Benlian chuckled to himself.

“That scared ’em, Pudgie!” he chuckled.  “A man they can’t X-ray—­that scared ’em!  We must put that down in the diary—­”

“Wasn’t it ripping!” I chuckled back.

He kept a sort of diary or record.  He gave it to me afterwards, but they’ve borrowed it.  It was as big as a ledger, and immensely valuable, I’m sure; they oughtn’t to borrow valuable things like that and not return them.  The laughing that Benlian and I have had over that diary!  It fooled them all—­the clever X-ray men, the artists of the academies, everybody!  Written on the fly-leaf was “To My Pudgie.”  I shall publish it when I get it back again.

Benlian had now got frightfully weak; it’s awfully hard work, passing yourself.  And he had to take a little milk now and then or he’d have died before he had quite finished.  I didn’t bother with miniatures any longer, and when angry letters came from my employers we just put them into the fire, Benlian and I, and we laughed—­that is to say, I laughed, but Benlian only smiled, being too weak to laugh really.  He’d lots of money, so that was all right; and I slept in his studio, to be there for the passing.

And that wouldn’t be very long now, I thought; and I was always looking at the statue.  Things like that (in case you don’t know) have to be done gradually, and I supposed he was busy filling up the inside of it and hadn’t got to the outside yet—­for the statue was much the same to look at.  But, reckoning off his sips of milk and snatches of sleep, he was making splendid progress, and the figure must be getting very full now.  I was awfully excited, it was getting so near....