“Won't you come in?” he said.
“Thanks.”
The voice had in it the same mockery as on Sunday; and it shot through him that Cramier had thought to find his wife here. If so, he did not betray it by any crude look round. He came in with his deliberate step, light and well-poised for so big a man.
“So this,” he said, “is where you produce your masterpieces! Anything great since you came back?”
Lennan lifted the cloths from the half-modelled figure of his bull-man. He felt malicious pleasure in doing that. Would Cramier recognize himself in this creature with the horn-like ears, and great bossed forehead? If this man who had her happiness beneath his heel had come here to mock, he should at all events get what he had come to give. And he waited.
“I see. You are giving the poor brute horns!”
If Cramier had seen, he had dared to add a touch of cynical humour, which the sculptor himself had never thought of. And this even evoked in the young man a kind of admiring compunction.
“Those are not horns,” he said gently; “only ears.”
Cramier lifted a hand and touched the edge of his own ear.
“Not quite like that, are they—human ears? But I suppose you would call this symbolic. What, if I may ask, does it represent?”