she beckoned to Moor and held a long
conversation with him in a window-recess. She advised him to keep
everything in readiness for departure, and she undertook to watch and
give him timely warning.

It was long after midnight, when Moor returned to his rooms. He sent the
sleepy servant to rest, and paced anxiously to and fro for a short time;
then he pushed Ulrich's portrait of Sophonisba nearer the mantel-piece,
where countless candles were burning in lofty sconces.

This was his friend, and yet it was not. The thing lacking--yes, the king
was right--was incomprehensible to a boy.

We cannot represent, what we are unable to feel. Yet Philip's censure had
been too severe. With a few strokes of the brush Moor expected to make
this picture a soul mirror of the beloved girl, from whom it was hard,
unspeakably hard for him to part.

"More than fifty!" he thought, a melancholy smile hovering around his
mouth.--"More than fifty, an old husband and father, and yet--yet--good
nourishing bread at home--God bless it, Heaven preserve it! It only this
girl were my daughter! How long the human heart retains its functional
power! Perhaps love is the pith of life--when it dries, the tree withers
too!"

Still absorbed in thought, Moor had seized his palette, and at intervals
added a few short, almost imperceptible strokes to the mouth, eyes, and
delicate nostrils of the portrait, before which he sat--but these few
strokes lent charm and intellectual expression to his pupil's work.

When he at last rose and looked at what he had done, he could not help
smiling, and asking himself how it was possible to imitate, with such
trivial materials, the noblest possessions of man: mind and soul. Both
now spoke to the spectator from these features. The right words were easy
to the master, and with them he had given the clumsy sentence meaning and
significance.

The next morning Ulrich found Moor before Sophonisba's portrait. The
pupil's sleep had been no less restless than the master's, for the former
had done something which lay heavy on his heart.

After being an involuntary witness of the scene in the studio the day
before he had taken a ride with Sanchez and had afterwards gone to
Kochel's to take a lesson. True, he now spoke Spanish with tolerable
fluency and knew something of Italian, but Kochel entertained him so
well, that he still visited him several times a week.

On this occasion, there was no translating. The German first ki