"Didn't you come here armed?"

"No."

Drene looked at him very intently. But Graylock had never been a liar.
After a few moments he went over to his desk, replaced the weapon under
the papers, and, still busy, said over his shoulder:

"All right. You can go."

VI

He wrote to Cecile once:

Hereafter keep clear of men like Graylock and like me. We're both of a
stripe--the same sort under our skins. I've known him all my life. It
all depends upon the opportunity, the circumstances, and the woman. And,
what is a woman between friends--between such friends as Graylock and I
once were--or between the sort of friends we have now become? Keep clear
of such men as we are. We were boys together.

For a week or two he kept his door locked and lived on what the janitor
provided for him, never going out of the studio at all.

He did no work, although there were several unexecuted commissions
awaiting his attention and a number of sketches, clay studies, and one
marble standing around the studio in various stages of progress. The
marble was the Annunciation. The head and throat and slender hands were
completed, and one slim naked foot.

Sometimes he wandered from one study to the next, vague-eyed, standing
for a long time before each, staring, lost in thought. Sometimes, in the
evening he read, choosing a book at random among the motley collection
in a corner case--a dusty, soiled assortment of books, ephemeral novels
of the moment, ponderous volumes which are in everybody's library but
which nobody reads, sets of histories, memoirs, essays, beautifully
bound and once cared for, but now dirty from neglect--jetsam from a
wrecked home.

There had been a time when law, order and neatness formed the basis
of Drene's going forth and coming in. He had been exact, precise,
fastidious; he had been sensitive to environment, a lover of beautiful
things, a man who deeply appreciated any symbol that suggested home and
hearth and family.

But when these three were shattered in the twinkling of an eye,
something else broke, too. And he gradually emerged from chaos,
indifferent to all that had formerly been a part of him, a silent
emotionless, burnt out thing, callous to all that he had once cared for.

Yet something of what he had been must have remained latent within him
for with unimpaired precision and logic he constructed his clay and
chiseled his marble; and there must have been in him something to
express, for the be