Fane made her sit down.
“I will go to him immediately,” he said. “I may be able to do something.”
“Yes, go—do go!” she exclaimed with feverish excitement.
Then suddenly she sprang up, and seizing his hands with hers, she said in a piercing voice: “You are a great doctor. Surely—surely you can keep this one life for me a little longer.”
As they stood, Fane was facing the statue, which was at her back, and while she spoke his eyes were drawn from the woman he loved to the marble thing he senselessly hated. It struck him that a ghastly change had stolen over it. A sudden flicker of absolute life surely infused it, quickened it even while she spoke, stole through the limbs one by one, welled up to the eyes as light pierces from a depth, flowed through all the marble. A pulse beat in the dead, cold heart. A mind rippled into the rigid, watching face. There was no absolute movement, and yet there was the sense of stir. Fane, absorbed in horror, seemed to watch an act of creation, to see life poured from some invisible and unknown source into the bodily chamber that had been void and dark.
Motionless he saw the statue dead; motionless he saw the statue live.
He drew his hands from Sydney's. He was too powerfully impressed to speak, but she looked up into his face, turned, and followed his eyes.
She, too, observed the change, for her lips parted, and a wild amazement shone in her eyes. Then she touched Fane's arm, and whispered, rather in awe than in horror, “Go—go to him. See if anything has happened. I will stay and watch here.”