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Drene twisted the automatic, rose and continued to twirl it, considering. Presently he began to pace the floor, no longer noticing the other man. Once his promenade brought him up facing the wall where a calendar hung.

He stood for a while looking at it absently. After a few moments he stepped nearer, detached the sheet for the present month, then one by one tore off the remaining sheets until he came to the month marked December, Graylock watching him all the while.

“I think it happened on Christmas,” remarked Drene turning toward the other and laying a finger on the number 25 printed in red.

Graylock’s head bent slightly.

“Very well. Suppose about eleven o’clock on Christmas night you give your automatic a thorough cleaning.

“If you say so.”

“You have one?”

“I shall buy one.”

“Didn’t you come here armed?”

“No.”

Drene looked at him very intently. But Graylock had never been a liar. After a few moments he went over to his desk, replaced the weapon under the papers, and, still busy, said over his shoulder:

“All right. You can go.”

VI

He wrote to Cecile once:

Hereafter keep clear of men like Graylock and like me. We’re both of a stripe–the same sort under our skins. I’ve known him all my life. It all depends upon the opportunity, the circumstances, and the woman. And, what is a woman between friends–between such friends as Graylock and I once were–or between the sort of friends we have now become? Keep clear of such men as we are. We were boys together.

For a week or two he kept his door locked and lived on what the janitor provided for him, never going out of the studio at all.

He did no work, although there were several unexecuted commissions awaiting his attention and a number of sketches, clay studies, and one marble standing around the studio in various stages of progress. The marble was the Annunciation. The head and throat and slender hands were completed, and one slim naked foot.

Sometimes he wandered from one study to the next, vague-eyed, standing for a long time before each, staring, lost in thought. Sometimes, in the evening he read, choosing a book at random among the motley collection in a corner case–a dusty, soiled assortment of books, ephemeral novels of the moment, ponderous volumes which are in everybody’s library but which nobody reads, sets of histories, memoirs, essays, beautifully bound and once cared for, but now dirty from neglect–jetsam from a wrecked home.

There had been a time when law, order and neatness formed the basis of Drene’s going forth and coming in. He had been exact, precise, fastidious; he had been sensitive to environment, a lover of beautiful things, a man who deeply appreciated any symbol that suggested home and hearth and family.

But when these three were shattered in the twinkling of an eye, something else broke, too. And he gradually emerged from chaos, indifferent to all that had formerly been a part of him, a silent emotionless, burnt out thing, callous to all that he had once cared for.

Yet something of what he had been must have remained latent within him for with unimpaired precision and logic he constructed his clay and chiseled his marble; and there must have been in him something to express, for the beauty of his work, spiritual and material, had set him high among the highest in his profession.

Sometimes sorrow changes the dross from the lamp of the spirit so that it burns with a purity almost unearthly; sometimes sorrow sears, rendering the very soul insensible; and sometimes sorrow remains under the ashes, a living coal steadily consuming all that is noble, hardening all that is ignoble; and is extinguished leaving a devil behind it–fully equipped to slay the crippled soul.

Alone in his studio at night, motionless in his chair, Drene was becoming aware of this devil. Reading by lamplight he grew conscious of it; recognized it as a companion of many years, now understanding that although pain had ended, hatred had remained, hiding, biding, and very, very quiet.