"It hardly seemed worth while," she began; but he interrupted her.
"I would not have gone in," he said, "even as I did, if I had known
there was a chance of your competing."
She turned toward him, and her eyes unconsciously said what she had
been careful not to put into words.
"Ah!" he exclaimed, with sudden comprehension. "You knew I was in it
and that is why you withdrew."
"Well," she said, trying to laugh lightly, "it would not have been
modest for me to compete against my master."
She moved away as she spoke. She had a tingling sense of his nearness,
a passionate yearning to turn toward him and to break down all barriers
which made her afraid. She felt that she had been rash in coming to the
studio, and had overestimated her own strength. She glanced around
quickly, as if in search of something which would help to bring the
conversation to conventional levels; but her eye fell upon a terra-
cotta figure which sent the blood surging into her head so fiercely
that a rushing sound seemed to fill her ears. It was the nude figure of
a soldier lying dead upon a trampled mound, with broken poppies about
him, while across the pedestal ran the inscription,--
"I strew these opiate flowers
Round thy restless pillow."
It was the figure beside the clay model of which, yet wet from his
hand, the sculptor had told her, that day long ago, of her husband's
death.
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