; Sophonisba is attached to you; the queen says so."

"And I gratefully feel it. It is hard to leave your gracious Majesty and
Sophonisba; but bread, Sire, bread--is necessary to life. I shall leave
friends here, dear friends--it will be difficult, very difficult, to
find new ones at my age."

"It is the same with me, and for that very reason you will stay, if you
are my friend! No more! Farewell, Antonio, till we meet again, perhaps
to-morrow, in spite of a chaos of business. Happy fellow that you are!
In the twinkling of an eye you will be revelling in colors again, while
the yoke, the iron yoke, weighs me down."

Moor thought he should be able to work undisturbed after the king had
left him, and left the door unbolted. He was standing before the easel
after dinner, engaged in painting, when the door of the corridor leading
to the treasury was suddenly flung open, without the usual warning, and
Philip again entered the studio. This time his cheeks wore a less pallid
hue than in the morning, and his gait showed no traces of the solemn
gravity, which had become a second nature to him,--on the contrary he
was gay and animated.

But the expression did not suit him; it seemed as if he had donned a
borrowed, foreign garb, in which he was ill at ease and could not move
freely.

Waving a letter in his right hand, he pointed to it with his left,
exclaiming:

"They are coming. This time two marvels at once. Our Saviour praying in
the garden of Gethsemane, and Diana at the Bath. Look, look! Even this
is a treasure. These lines are from Titian's own hand."

"A peerless old man," Moor began; but Philip impetuously interrupted:
"Old man, old man? A youth, a man, a vigorous man. How soon he will be
ninety, and yet--yet; who will equal him?"

As he uttered the last words, the monarch stopped before Sophonisba's
portrait, and pointing to it with the scornful chuckle peculiar to him,
continued gaily:

"There the answer meets me directly. That red! The Venetian's laurels
seem to have turned your high flown pupil's head. A hideous picture!"

"It doesn't seem so bad to me," replied Moor. "There is even something
about it I like."

"You, you?" cried Philip. "Poor Sophonisba!"

"Those carbuncle eyes! And a mouth, that looks as if she could eat
nothing but sugar-plums. I don't know what tickles me to-day. Give me
the palette. The outlines are tolerably good, the colors fairly shriek.
But what boy can understand a woman, a woma