was covered with broken plaster, and the lay figure was
overthrown, Rodney saw none of these things, he only saw that his
Virgin and Child was not on the modelling stool, and not seeing it
there, he hoped that the group had been stolen, anything were
better than that it should have been destroyed. But this is what
had happened: the group, now a mere lump of clay, lay on the
floor, and the modelling stand lay beside it.

"I cannot think," said the charwoman, "who has done this. It was a
wicked thing to do. Oh, sir, they have broken this beautiful
statue that you had in the Exhibition last year," and she picked
up the broken fragments of a sleeping girl.

"That doesn't matter," said Rodney. "My group is gone."

"But that, sir, was only in the clay. May I be helping you to pick
it up, sir? It is not broken altogether perhaps."

Rodney waved her aside. He was pale and he could not speak, and
was trembling. He had not the courage to untie the cloths, for he
knew there was nothing underneath but clay, and his manner was so
strange that the charwoman was frightened. He stood like one dazed
by a dream. He could not believe in reality, it was too mad, too
discordant, too much like a nightmare. He had only finished the
group yesterday!

He still called it his Virgin and Child, but it had never been a
Virgin and Child in the sense suggested by the capital letters,
for he had not yet put on the drapery that would convert a naked
girl and her baby into the Virgin and Child. He had of course