your blood. She's the mulatto woman who was standing in here a
while ago, with her apron to her eyes. The old woman is a fury; there
never was anybody like her. She made Harvey's life a hell for him when
he lived at home; he was so sick ashamed of it. I never could see how he
kept himself sweet."

"He was wonderful," said Steavens slowly, "wonderful; but until tonight I
have never known how wonderful."

"That is the eternal wonder of it, anyway; that it can come even from
such a dung heap as this," the lawyer cried, with a sweeping gesture
which seemed to indicate much more than the four walls within which they
stood.

"I think I'll see whether I can get a little air. The room is so close I
am beginning to feel rather faint," murmured Steavens, struggling with
one of the windows. The sash was stuck, however, and would not yield, so
he sat down dejectedly and began pulling at his collar. The lawyer came
over, loosened the sash with one blow of his red fist and sent the window
up a few inches. Steavens thanked him, but the nausea which had been
gradually climbing into his throat for the last half hour left him with
but one desire--a desperate feeling that he must get away from this place
with what was left of Harvey Merrick. Oh, he comprehended well enough
now the quiet bitterness of the smile that he had seen so often on his
master's lips!

Once when Merrick returned from a visit home, he brought with him a
singularly feeling and suggestive bas-relief of a thin, faded old woman,
sitting and sewing something pinned to her knee; while a full-lipped,
full-blooded little urchin, his trousers held up by a single gallows,
stood beside her, impatiently twitching her gown to call her attention to
a butterfly he had caught. Steavens, impressed by the tender and delicate
modelling of the thin, tired face, had asked him if it were his mother.
He remembered the dull flush that had burned up in the sculptor's face.

The lawyer was sitting in a rocking-chair beside the coffin, his head
thrown back and his eyes closed. Steavens looked at him earnestly,
puzzled at the line of the chin, and wondering why a man should conceal a
feature of such distinction under that disfiguring shock of beard.
Suddenly, as though he felt the young sculptor's keen glance, Jim Laird
opened his eyes.

"Was he always a good deal of an oyster?" he asked abruptly. "He was
terribly shy as a boy."

"Yes, he was an oyster, since you put it so," rejoined S