ather ominous.

"She seems to be a very good-hearted sort of a person," Niafer conceded,
in matrimonial privacy, "though certainly she is rather queer. Why,
Manuel, she showed me this afternoon ten of the drollest figures to
which--but, no, you would never guess it in the world,--to which she is
going to give life some day, just as you did to me when you got my looks
and legs and pretty much everything else all wrong."

"When does she mean to quicken them?" Dom Manuel asked: and he added,
"Not that I did, dear snip, but I shall not argue about it."

"Why, that is the droll part of it, and I can quite understand your
unwillingness to admit how little you had remembered about me. When the
man who made them has been properly rewarded, she said, with, Manuel,
the most appalling expression you ever saw."

"What were these images like?" asked Dom Manuel.

Niafer described them: she described them unsympathetically, but there
was no doubt they were the images which Manuel had left unquickened upon
Upper Morven.

Manuel nodded, smiled, and said: "So the man who made these images is to
be properly rewarded! Well, that is encouraging, for true merit should
always be rewarded."

"But, Manuel, if you had seen her look! and seen what horrible misshapen
creatures they were--!"

"Nonsense!" said Manuel, stoutly: "you are a dear snip, but that does
not make you a competent critic of either physiognomy or sculpture."

So he laughed the matter aside; and this, as it happened, was the last
that Dom Manuel heard of the ten images which he had made upon Upper
Morven. But they of Poictesme declared that Queen Freydis did give life
to these figures, each at a certain hour, and that her wizardry set them
to live as men among mankind, with no very happy results, because these
images differed from naturally begotten persons by having inside them a
spark of the life of Audela.

Thus Manuel and his wife came uneventfully to August; all the while
there was never a more decorous or more thoughtful hostess than Queen
Freydis; and nobody would have suspected that sorcery underlay the
running of her household. It was only through Dom Manuel's happening to
arise very early one morning, at the call of nature, that he chanced to
be passing through the hall when, at the moment of sunrise, the
night-porter turned into an orange-colored rat, and crept into the
wainscoting: and Manuel of course said nothing about this to anybody,
because it was no