ack to get it. Two minutes later he rejoined them in the little
drawing-room, where the growling captain was still demanding the whole
time and attention of his daughter, and, the motor being ready, the
three men walked out, got into it, and were whisked away to the house
which once had been the home of the vanished George Carboys.

It proved to be a small, isolated brick house in very bad condition,
standing in an out-of-the-way road somewhere between Putney and
Wimbledon. It stood, somewhat back from the road, in the midst of a
little patch of ground abounding in privet and laurel bushes, and it was
evident that its cheapness had been its chief attraction to the two men
who had rented it, although, on entering, it was found to possess at the
back a sort of extension, with top and side lights, which must have
appealed to Van Nant's need of something in the nature of a studio. At
all events, he had converted it into a very respectable apology for one;
and Cleek was not a little surprised by what it contained.

Rich stuffs, bits of tapestry, Persian draperies, Arabian
prayer-mats--relics of his other and better days and of his Oriental
wanderings--hung on the walls and ornamented the floor; his rejected
pictures and his unsold statues, many of them life-sized and all of clay
coated with a lustreless paint to make them look like marble, were
disposed about the place with an eye to artistic effect, and near to an
angle where stood on a pedestal, half concealed, half revealed by
artistically arranged draperies, the life-size figure of a Roman
senator, in toga and sandals, there was the one untidy spot, the one
utterly inartistic thing the room contained.

It was the crude, half-finished shape of a recumbent female figure, of
large proportions and abominable modelling, stretched out at full length
upon a long, low trestle-supported "sculptor's staging," on which also
lay Van Nant's modelling tools and his clay-stained working blouse.
Cleek looked at the huge, unnatural thing, out of drawing, anatomically
wrong in many particulars, and felt like quoting Angelo's famous remark
anent his master Lorenzo's faun: "What a pity to have spoilt so much
expensive material," and Van Nant, observing, waved his hand toward it.

"A slumbering nymph," he explained. "Only the head and shoulders
finished as yet, you see. I began it the day before yesterday, but my
hand seems somehow to have lost its cunning. Here are the keys of all
the ro