She gave him still another long look.

“No,” she said, “I will come to you to-morrow, if you will direct me to your room.”

“It is on the sixth floor,” he replied; “the highest of all. It is a bare little place.”

“I will come,” she said, and was turning away when he stopped her.

“I—I should like to tell you how grateful I am—” he began.

“There is no need,” she responded with bitter lightness. “You will pay me some day—when you are a great artist.” But when she reached the next landing she glanced down and saw that he still stood beneath watching her.

The next day she kept her word and went to him. She found his room poorer and barer even than she had fancied it might be. The ceiling was low and slanting; in one corner stood a narrow iron bedstead, in another a wooden table; in the best light the small window gave his easel was placed with a chair before it.

When he had opened the door in answer to her summons, and she saw all this, she glanced quickly at his face to see if there was any shade of confusion upon it, but there was none. He appeared only rejoiced and eager.

“I felt sure it was you,” he said.

“Were you then so sure that I would come?” she asked.

“You said you would,” he answered. He placed her as he wished to paint her, and then sat down to his work. In a few moments he was completely absorbed in it. For a long time he did not speak at all. The utter silence which reigned—a silence which was not only a suspension of speech but a suspension of any other thought beyond his task—was a new experience to her. His cheek flushed, his eyes burned dark and bright; it seemed as if he scarcely breathed. When he turned to look at her she was conscious each time of a sudden thrill of feeling. More than once he paused for several moments, brush and palette in hand, simply watching her face. At one of these pauses she herself broke the silence.

“Why do you look at me so?” she asked. “You look at me as if—as if—” And she broke off with an uneasy little laugh.

He roused himself with a slight start and colored sensitively, passing his hand across his forehead.

“What I want to paint is not always in your face,” he answered. “Sometimes I lose it, and then I must wait a little until—until I find it again. It is not only your face I want, it is yourself—yourself!” And he made a sudden unconscious gesture with his hands.

She tried to laugh again,—hard and lightly as before,—but failed.

“Myself!” she said. “Mon Dieu! Do not grasp at me, Monsieur. It will not pay you. Paint my flesh, my hair, my eyes,—they are good,—but do not paint me.”

He looked troubled.

“I am afraid my saying that sounded stilted,” he returned. “I explained myself poorly. It is not easy for me to explain myself well.”

“I understood,” she said; “and I have warned you.”

They did not speak to each other again during the whole sitting except once, when he asked her if she was warm enough.

“I have a fire to-day,” he said.

“Have you not always a fire?” she asked.

“No,” he answered with a smile; “but when you come here there will always be one.”

“Then,” she said, “I will come often, that I may save you from death.”

“Oh!” he replied, “it is easier than you think to forget that one is cold.”

“Yes,” she returned. “And it is easier than you think for one to die.”

When she was going away, she made a movement toward the easel, but he stopped her.

“Not yet,” he said. “Not just yet.”

She drew back.

“I have never cared to look at myself before,” she said. “I do not know why I should care now. Perhaps,” with the laugh again, “it is that I wish to see what you will make of me!”

Afterward, as she sat over her little porcelain stove in her room below, she scarcely comprehended her own mood.

“He is not like the rest,” she said. “He knows nothing of the world. He is one of the good. He cares only for his art. How simple, and kind, and pure! The little room is like a saint’s cell.” And then, suddenly, she flung her arms out wearily, with a heavy sigh. “Ah, Dieu!” she said, “how dull the day is! The skies are lead!”

A few days later she gave a sitting to an old artist whose name was Masson, and she found that he had heard of what had happened.

“And so you sit to the American,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Well—and you find him—?”

“I find him,” she repeated after him. “Shall I tell you what I find him?”

“I shall listen with delight.”

“I find him—a soul! You and I, my friend—and the rest of us—are bodies; he is a soul!”

The artist began to whistle softly as he painted.

“It is dangerous work,” he said at length, “for women to play with souls.”

“That is true,” she answered, coldly.

The same day she went again to the room on the sixth floor. She again sat through an hour of silence in which the American painted eagerly, now and then stopping to regard her with searching eyes.

“But not as the rest regard me,” she said to herself. “He forgets that it is a woman who sits here. He sees only what he would paint.”

As time went by, this fact, which she always felt, was in itself a fascination.

In the chill, calm atmosphere of the place there was repose for her. She found nothing to resent, nothing to steel herself against, she need no longer think of herself at all. She had time to think of the man in whose presence she sat. From the first she had seen something touching in his slight stooping figure, thin young face and dark womanish eyes, and after she had heard the simple uneventful history of his life, she found them more touching still.

He was a New Englander, the last surviving representative of a frail and short-lived family. His parents had died young, leaving him quite alone, with a mere pittance to depend upon, and throughout his whole life he had cherished but one aim.

“When I was a child I used to dream of coming here,” he said, “and as I grew older I worked and struggled for it. I knew I must gain my end some day, and the time came when it was gained.”

“And this is the end?” she asked, glancing round at the poor place. “This is all of life you desire?”

He did not look up at her.

“It is all I have,” he answered.

She wondered if he would not ask her some questions regarding herself, but he did not.

“He does not care to know,” she thought sullenly. And then she told herself that he did know, and a mocking devil of a smile settled on her lip and was there when he turned toward her again.

But the time never came when his manner altered, when he was less candid and gentle, or less grateful for the favor she was bestowing upon him.

She scarcely knew how it was that she first began to know the sound of his foot upon the stairway and to listen for it. Her earliest consciousness of it was when once she awakened suddenly out of a dead sleep at night and found herself sitting upright with her hand upon her heavily throbbing heart.

“What is it?” she cried in a loud whisper. But she spoke only to herself and the darkness. She knew what it was and did not lie down again until the footsteps had reached the top of the last flight and the door above had opened and closed.

The time arrived when there was scarcely a trifling incident in his