“You want me to work again; but it is of no use—­I could do no good with it.”

The old woman’s eyes filled with tears, but she did not answer him.  In the evening Pollux begged her to put away the tools.

When he was gone to bed she did so, and while she was moving about with a light in the dark, lumber-room in which she had kept them with other disused things, her eye fell on the unfinished wax model which had been the last work of her ill-starred son.  A new idea struck her.  She called Euphorion, made him throw the clay into the court-yard and place the model on the table by the side of the wax.  Then she put out the very same tools as he had been using on the fateful day of their expulsion from Lochias, close to the cleverly-sketched portrait, and begged her husband to go out with her quite early next morning and to remain absent till mid-day.

“You will see,” she said, “when he is standing face to face with his last work and there is no one by to disturb him or look at him, he will find the ends of the threads that have been cut and perhaps be able to gather them up again and go on with the work where it was interrupted.”

The mother’s heart had hit upon the right idea.  When Pollux had eaten his breakfast he went to his table exactly as he had done the clay before; but the sight of the work in hand had quite a different effect to the mere raw clay and wax.  His eyes sparkled; he walked round the table with an attentive gaze examining his work as keenly and as eagerly as if it were some fine thing he saw for the first time.  Memory revived in his mind.  He laughed aloud, clasped his hands and said to himself, “Capital!  Something may be made of that!”

His dull weariness slipped off him, as it were; a confident smile parted his lips and he seized the wax with a firm hand.  But he did not begin to work at once; he only tried whether his fingers had not lost their cunning, and whether the yielding material was obedient to his will.  The wax was no less docile to his touch than in former days, as he pinched or pulled it.  Perhaps then the tormenting thought that blighted his life, the dread that in the prison he had ceased to be an artist, and had lost all his faculty was nothing more than a mad delusion!  He must at any rate try how he could get on at the work.

No one was by to observe him—­he might dare the attempt at once.  The sweat of anguish stood in large beads on his brow as he finally concentrated his volition, shook back the hair from his face and took up a lump of the wax in both hands.  There stood the portrait of Antinous with the head only half-finished.  Now—­could he succeed in modelling that lovely head free-hand and from memory?