sperated rival had certainly come to
propose to his dear Lincoln, and he thought only of the latter.

"He must know nothing until afterward. He would take the affair upon
himself, and I have a chance to kill him, that Gorka--to wound him,
at least. In any case, I will arrange it so that a second duel will be
rendered difficult to that lunatic.... But, first of all, let us make
sure that we have not spoken too loudly and that they have not heard
upstairs the ill-bred fellow's loud voice."

It was in such terms that he qualified his adversary of the morrow. For
very little more he would have judged Gorka unpardonable not to thank
Lincoln, who had done him the honor to supplant him in the Countess's
favor!

In the meantime, let us cast a glance at the atelier! When the friend,
devoted to complicity, but also to heroism, entered the vast room, he
could see at the first glance that he had been mistaken and that no
sound of voices had reached that peaceful retreat.

The atelier of the American painter was furnished with a harmonious
sumptuousness which real artists know how to gather around them. The
large strip of sky seen through the windows looked down upon a corner
veritably Roman--of the Rome of to-day, which attests an uninterrupted
effort toward forming a new city by the side of the old one. One could
see an angle of the old garden and the fragment of an antique building,
with a church steeple beyond. It was on a background of azure, of
verdure and of ruins, in a horizon larger and more distant, but composed
of the same elements, that was to arise the face of the young girl,
designed after the manner, so sharp and so modelled, of the 'Pier della
Francesca', with whom Maitland had been preoccupied for six months.

All great composers, of an originality more composite than genitive,
have these infatuations.

Maitland was at his easel, dressed with that correct elegance which
is the almost certain mark of Anglo-Saxon artists. With his little
varnished shoes, his fine black socks, spotted with red, his coat of
quilted silk, his light cravat and the purity of his linen, he had the
air of a gentleman who applied himself to an amateur effort, and not of
the patient and laborious worker he really was. But his canvases and his
studies, hung on all sides, among tapestries, arms and trinkets,
bespoke patient labor. It was the history of an energy bent upon the
acquisition of a personality constantly fleeting. Maitland manif