and there, resting upon oak brackets, two or three works
of Sebastien Ruys, of which the last, exhibited after his death, was
covered with a piece of black gauze.

The mistress of the house, Felicia Ruys, the daughter of the famous
sculptor and herself already known by two masterpieces, the bust of her
father and that of the Duc de Mora, was standing in the middle of the
studio, occupied in the modelling of a figure. Wearing a tightly fitting
riding-habit of blue cloth with long folds, a fichu of China silk
twisted about her neck like a man's tie, her black, fine hair caught up
carelessly above the antique modelling of her small head, Felicia was
at work with an extreme earnestness which added to her beauty the
concentration, the intensity which are given to the features by an
attentive and satisfied expression. But that changed immediately upon
the arrival of the doctor.

"Ah, it is you," said she brusquely, as though awaked from a dream. "The
bell was rung, then? I did not hear it."

And in the ennui, the lassitude that suddenly took possession of that
adorable face, the only thing that remained expressive and brilliant was
the eyes, eyes in which the factitious gleam of the Jenkins pills was
heightened by the constitutional wildness.

Oh, how the doctor's voice became humble and condescending as he
answered her:

"So you are quite absorbed in your work, my dear Felicia. Is it
something new that you are at work on there? It seems to me very
pretty."

He moved towards the rough and still formless model out of which there
was beginning to issue vaguely a group of two animals, one a greyhound
which was scampering at full speed with a rush that was truly
extraordinary.

"The idea of it came to me last night. I began to work it out by
lamplight. My poor Kadour, he sees no fun in it," said the girl,
glancing with a look of caressing kindness at the greyhound whose paws
the little page was endeavouring to place apart in order to get the pose
again.

Jenkins remarked in a fatherly way that she did wrong to tire herself
thus, and taking her wrist with ecclesiastical precautions:

"Come, I am sure you are feverish."

At the contact of his hand with her own, Felicia made a movement almost
of repulsion.

"No, no, leave me alone. Your pills can do nothing for me. When I do not
work I am bored. I am bored to death, to extinction; my thoughts are the
colour of that water which flows over yonder, brackish and heavy. T