“But I!  I am forced to know myself.  To feel myself borne along in spite of myself; and to realize that she who should have worn a crown of happy womanhood, lies there a sacrifice, to be bewailed like Jepthah’s one fair daughter; and to sit here in full dread of the ebbing of even this great emotion, knowing too well that it will pass out of my life when it shall have achieved its purpose, leaving only as evidence this—­another great work, crystalized into immortality in everlasting stone.  I know that I cannot long hold it here in my heart.  The day will come—­perhaps soon—­when I shall stand outside that door, and recognize this as my work, and be proud of it, without the power to grieve, as I do now; when I shall approve my own handiwork, and be unable to mourn for her who was sacrificed to achieve it.  What is your pain to mine?”

And I saw the hot tears drop from his eyes.  I saw them fall on the marble floor, and they watered the very spot where his name was so soon to spring up in pride to confess his handiwork.

I looked on her calm face.  I knew she did not regret her part!  I rose, and, without a word, I passed out at the wide door, and, without looking back, I passed down the slope in the dusk, and left them together—­the woman I had loved, and the friend I had lost!

* * * * *

As his voice died away, he sat upright quickly, threw a glance about the circle, and, with another fine gesture said:  “Et voila!”

The Doctor was the only one to really laugh, though a broad grin ran round the circle.

“Well,” remarked the Doctor, who had been leaning against a tree, and indulging in shrugs and an occasional groan, which had not even disconcerted the story teller, “I suppose that is how that very great man, your governor, did the trick.  I can see him in every word.”

“That is all you know about it,” laughed the Sculptor.  “That is not a bit how the governor did it.  That is how I should have done it, had I been the governor, and had the old man’s chances.  I call that an ideal thing to happen to a man.”

“Not even founded on fact—­which might have been some excuse for telling it,” groaned the Critic.  “I’d love to write a review of that story.  I’d polish it off.”

“Of course you would,” sneered the Sculptor.  “That’s all a critic is for—­to polish off the tales he can’t write.  I call that a nice romantic, ideal tale for a sculptor to conceive, and as the Doctor said the other night, it is a possible story, since I conceived it, and what the mind of mortal can conceive, can happen.”

“The trouble,” said the Journalist, “with chaps like you, and the Critic, is that your people are all framework.  They’re not a bit of flesh and blood.”

“I’d like to know,” said the Sculptor, throwing himself back in his chair, “who has a right to decide that?”

“What I’d like to know,” said the Youngster, “is, what did she do between times?  Of course he sculpted, and earned slathers of money.  But she—?”