"You shall go, my dear child."

And she went; and never had she looked more beautiful.

"Doctor, at all costs, though it should kill me, to-morrow morning I
must be at the Cabinet Council."

He was there, and carried away from it in a triumph of eloquence and of
ambitious diplomacy.

Afterward--oh, afterward, if you please! But no matter! To their
last day Jenkins's clients went about, showed themselves, cheated the
devouring egotism of the crowd. They died on their feet, as became men
and women of the world.

After a thousand peregrinations in the Chaussee d'Antin and the
Champs-Elysees, after having visited every millionaire or titled
personage in the Faubourg Saint Honore, the fashionable doctor arrived
at the corner of the Cours-la-Reine and the Rue Francois I., before a
house with a rounded front, which occupied the angle on the quay, and
entered an apartment on the ground floor which resembled in nowise those
through which he had been passing since morning. From the threshold,
tapestries covering the wall, windows of old stained glass with strips
of lead cutting across a discrete and composite light, a gigantic saint
in carved wood which fronted a Japanese monster with protruding eyes
and a back covered with delicate scales like tiles, indicated the
imaginative and curious taste of an artist. The little page who answered
the door held in leash an Arab greyhound larger than himself.

"Mme. Constance is at mass," he said, "and Mademoiselle is in the studio
quite alone. We have been at work since six o'clock this morning," added
the child with a rueful yawn which the dog caught on the wing, making
him open wide his pink mouth with its sharp teeth.

Jenkins, whom we have seen enter with so much self-possession the
chamber of the Minister of State, trembled a little as he raised the
curtain masking the door of the studio which had been left open. It was
a splendid sculptor's studio, the front of which, on the street corner,
semi-circular in shape, gave the room one whole wall of glass, with
pilasters at the sides, a large, well-lighted bay, opal-coloured just
then by reason of the fog. More ornate than are usually such work-rooms,
which the stains of the plaster, the boasting-tools, the clay, the
puddles of water generally cause to resemble a stone-mason's shed, this
one added a touch of coquetry to its artistic purpose. Green plants in
every corner, a few good pictures suspended against the bare wall
and, here