d, to come to the point, how long do you mean to carry on this
little game?"

"Game?" repeated the goddess, absently.

"How long are you going to foller me about in this ridiclous way?"

"Till you submit, and profess your willingness to redeem your promise."

"Oh, and you're coming every evening till then, are you?"

"At nightfall of each day I have power to revisit you."

"Well, come then!" he said, with a fling of impatient anger. "I tell you
beforehand that you won't get anything by it. Not if you was to come and
bring a whole stonemason's yard of sculptures along with you, you
wouldn't! You ought to know better than to come pestering a respectable
tradesman in this bold-faced manner!"

She smiled with a languid contemptuous tolerance, which maddened
Leander.

"Rave on," she said. "Truly, you are a sorry prize for such as I to
stoop to win; yet I will it, nor shall you escape me. There will come a
day when, forsaken by all you hold dear on earth, despised, ruined,
distracted, you will pray eagerly for the haven of refuge to which I
alone can guide you. Take heed, lest your conduct now be remembered
then! I have spoken."

They were indeed her last words that evening, and they impressed the
hairdresser, in spite of himself. Custom habituates the mind to any
marvel, and already he had overcome his first horror at the periodical
awakenings of the statue, and surprise was swallowed up by exasperation;
now, however, he quailed under her dark threats. Could it ever really
come to pass that he would sue to this stone to hide him in the realms
of the supernatural?

"I know this," he told himself, "if it once gets about that there's a
hairdresser to be seen in Bloomsbury chivied about after dark by a
classical statue, I shan't dare to show my face. Yet I don't know how
I'm to prevent her coming out after me, at all events now and then. If
she was only a little more like other people, I shouldn't mind so much;
but it's more than I can bear to have to go about with a _tablow vivant_
or a _pose plastique_ on my arm!"

All at once he started to his feet. "I've got it!" he cried, and went
downstairs to his laboratory, to reappear with some camel-hair brushes,
grease-paints, and a selection from his less important discoveries in
the science of cosmetics; namely, an "eyebrow accentuator," a vase of
"Tweddle's Cream of Carnations" and "Blondinette Bloom," a china box of
"Conserve of Coral" for the lips, and one of his mos