startled look. She glanced at the rigid little figure.
She raised it for a minute. Her face grew inscrutable. Would she laugh
or cry? He worked with hasty, snatched glances. Such a moment would not
come again. A flitting crash startled him from the canvas. He looked up.
The Bambino lay in a pathetic heap on the floor, scattered with
fragments of a rare Venetian glass. She sat erect and imperious, looking
with scorn at the wreck. Two great tears welled. They overflowed. The
floods pressed behind them. She dropped her face in her hands. Before he
could reach her she had darted from the chair. The mask of scorn was
gone. She fled from him, from herself, blindly, stopping only when the
wall of the studio intervened. She stood with her face buried in the
drapery, her shoulders wrenched with sobs.

He approached her. He waited. The Bambino lay with its wooden face
staring at the ceiling. It was a crisis for them all. The next move
would determine everything. He must not risk too much, again. The
picture--art--hung on her sobs. Lover--artist? He paused a second too
long.

She turned toward him slowly, serenely. Her glance fell across him,
level and tranquil. The traces of ignored tears lay in smiling drops on
her face. The softened scorn played across it. "Shall we finish the
sitting?" she asked, in a conventional voice.

He took up his brush uncertainly. She seated herself, gathering up the
scattered work. For a few moments she sewed rapidly. Then the soft
fabric fell to her lap. She sat looking before her, unconscious, except
that her glance seemed to rest now and then on the fallen figure in its
fragments of glass.

For two hours he worked feverishly, painting with swiftest skill and
power. At times he caught his breath at the revelation in the face. He
was too alert to be human. The artist forgot the woman. Faithfully, line
by line, he laid bare her heart. She sat unmoved. When at last, from
sheer weariness, the brush dropped from his hand, she stepped from the
model-stand, and stood at his side. She looked at the canvas
attentively. The inscrutable look of the painted face seemed but a faint
reflex of the living one.

"You have succeeded well," she said at last. "We will omit the Bambino."

She moved slowly, graciously, toward the door, gathering the fragile
sewing as she went. He started toward her--suddenly conscious of her
power--a man again. A parting of the draperies arrested them. It was
Salai, his face agit