d casts and the
piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a
series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long
amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling. A draped lay figure
leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind
outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night. Nothing was alive in
this part of the room, nothing alight except a few rare glints upon the
gold of the frames, and the blades of two crossed swords. Only in a
corner, at the far end, at a distance exaggerated by the shadows, sat
Lampron engraving, solitary, motionless, beneath the light of a lamp. His
back was toward me. The lamp's rays threw a strong light on his delicate
hand, on the workmanlike pose of his head, which it surrounded with a
nimbus, and on a painting--a woman's head--which he was copying. He
looked superb like that, and I thought how doubly tempted Rembrandt would
have been by the deep significance as well as by the chiaroscuro of this
interior.

I stamped my foot. Lampron started, and turned half around, narrowing his
eyes as he peered into the darkness.

"Ah, it's you," he said. He rose and came quickly toward me, as if to
prevent me from approaching the table.

"You don't wish me to look?"

He hesitated a moment.

"After all, why not?" he answered.

The copper plate was hardly marked with a few touches of the needle. He
turned the reflector so as to throw all its rays upon the painting.

"O Lampron, what a charming head!"

It was indeed a lovely head; an Italian girl, three quarter face, painted
after the manner of Leonardo, with firm but delicate touches, and lights
and shades of infinite subtlety, and possessing, like all that master's
portraits of women, a straightforward look that responds to the gazer's,
but which he seeks to interrogate in vain. The hair, brown with golden
lights, was dressed in smooth plaits above the temples. The neck, 1351
somewhat long, emerged from a dark robe broadly indicated.

"I do not know this, Sylvestre?"

"No, it's an old thing."

"A portrait, of course?"

"My first."

"You never did better; line, color, life, you have got them all."

"You need not tell me that! In one's young days, look you, there are
moments of real inspiration, when some one whispers in the ear and guides
the hand; a lightness of touch, the happy audacity of the beginner, a
wealth of daring never met with again. Would you believe that I have