at
him with big, soft Roman eyes. On seeing Rowland he put her down with
a kiss, and stepped forward with a conscious grin, an unresentful
admission that he was sensitive both to chubbiness and ridicule.
Rowland began to pity him again; he had taken his dismissal from the
drawing-room so meekly.

"You don't keep your promise," said Rowland, "to come and see me. Don't
forget it. I want you to tell me about Rome thirty years ago."

"Thirty years ago? Ah, dear sir, Rome is Rome still; a place where
strange things happen! But happy things too, since I have your renewed
permission to call. You do me too much honor. Is it in the morning or in
the evening that I should least intrude?"

"Take your own time, Cavaliere; only come, sometime. I depend upon you,"
said Rowland.

The Cavaliere thanked him with an humble obeisance. To the Cavaliere,
too, he felt that he was, in Roman phrase, sympathetic, but the idea of
pleasing this extremely reduced gentleman was not disagreeable to him.

Miss Light's bust stood for a while on exhibition in Roderick's studio,
and half the foreign colony came to see it. With the completion of his
work, however, Roderick's visits at the Palazzo F---- by no means came
to an end. He spent half his time in Mrs. Light's drawing-room, and
began to be talked about as "attentive" to Christina. The success of the
bust restored his equanimity, and in the garrulity of his good-humor he
suffered Rowland to see that she was just now the object uppermost in
his thoughts. Rowland, when they talked of her, was rather listener
than speaker; partly because Roderick's own tone was so resonant and
exultant, and partly because, when his companion laughed at him for
having called her unsafe, he was too perplexed to defend himself.
The impression remained that she was unsafe; that she was a complex,
willful, passionate creature, who might easily engulf a too confiding
spirit in the eddies of her capricious temper. And yet he strongly felt
her charm; the eddies had a strange fascination! Roderick, in the glow
of that renewed admiration provoked by the fixed attention of portrayal,
was never weary of descanting on the extraordinary perfection of her
beauty.

"I had no idea of it," he said, "till I began to look at her with an eye
to reproducing line for line and curve for curve. Her face is the most
exquisite piece of modeling that ever came from creative hands. Not
a line without meaning, not a hair's breadth that is