oung
lady?"

"If I could tell you that, it would be plain sailing. But she 'll not
tell me again I am weak!"

"Are you very sure you are not weak?"

"I may be, but she shall never know it."

Rowland said no more until they reached the Corso, when he asked his
companion whether he was going to his studio.

Roderick started out of a reverie and passed his hands over his eyes.
"Oh no, I can't settle down to work after such a scene as that. I was
not afraid of breaking my neck then, but I feel all in a tremor now. I
will go--I will go and sit in the sun on the Pincio!"

"Promise me this, first," said Rowland, very solemnly: "that the next
time you meet Miss Light, it shall be on the earth and not in the air."

Since his return from Frascati, Roderick had been working doggedly at
the statue ordered by Mr. Leavenworth. To Rowland's eye he had made a
very fair beginning, but he had himself insisted, from the first, that
he liked neither his subject nor his patron, and that it was impossible
to feel any warmth of interest in a work which was to be incorporated
into the ponderous personality of Mr. Leavenworth. It was all against
the grain; he wrought without love. Nevertheless after a fashion he
wrought, and the figure grew beneath his hands. Miss Blanchard's friend
was ordering works of art on every side, and his purveyors were in many
cases persons whom Roderick declared it was infamy to be paired with.
There had been grand tailors, he said, who declined to make you a coat
unless you got the hat you were to wear with it from an artist of their
own choosing. It seemed to him that he had an equal right to exact that
his statue should not form part of the same system of ornament as the
"Pearl of Perugia," a picture by an American confrere who had, in Mr.
Leavenworth's opinion, a prodigious eye for color. As a customer, Mr.
Leavenworth used to drop into Roderick's studio, to see how things
were getting on, and give a friendly hint or so. He would seat himself
squarely, plant his gold-topped cane between his legs, which he held
very much apart, rest his large white hands on the head, and enunciate
the principles of spiritual art, as he hoisted them one by one, as you
might say, out of the depths of his moral consciousness. His benignant
and imperturbable pomposity gave Roderick the sense of suffocating
beneath a large fluffy bolster, and the worst of the matter was that
the good gentleman's placid vanity had an integument