if he
thought to appease her by some jesting or even gallant apology? Well,
she would soon let him know with whom he had to deal, and that he could
not escape so easily. Had she not been called "the girl without a
heart," and was she not at this moment without friend or protector,
forced to rely entirely upon her native dignity, which had just been so
audaciously insulted?

"If the gentleman would have the goodness--I should be very glad to see
him--very glad!"

She stood in the middle of the room as he entered. Her beautiful face
had struggled hard to assume its coldest and haughtiest expression. But
with the first look that she cast upon the visitor, the armor of ice
that she had fastened about her bosom melted away.

For, in fact, a very different man from the one she had expected stood
before her. Where was the confident smile that sought to make the
matter appear in the light of a jest, or even of an act of homage?
Where the confidence with which the famous master reckons upon
absolution for the sin of having made an unknown beauty immortal?

It was true, he did not appear quite like a penitent malefactor. Erect,
and with a scarcely perceptible inclination of the head, he saluted
her, and his eyes did not avoid hers; on the contrary, they even dwelt
upon her features with so gloomy a fire that she involuntarily lowered
her eyelids, and asked herself in secret whether she was not the guilty
one after all, since this man appeared before her so sad and
melancholy.

"Gnaediges Fraeulein," he said, "I have given you reason to be very
angry with me. I merely come to inform you that the cause of your
displeasure is already removed. If you were willing to visit my
_atelier_ again--which, unfortunately, I must doubt--you would see in
the place where your own features confronted you this morning nothing
but a shapeless mass."

"You have--you really ought to have--"

"I have done at once what I owed to you, in order that you might not
form a wrong opinion of me. Sooner or later I should have had to do it
in any case--even though no one had urged me to it. I wish sincerely
that you would believe me when I say this--though I scarcely dare to
hope so, since you do not know me--and are perhaps still too angry with
me not to--not to believe me capable of any piece of discourtesy."

"I?--I confess--I have until now thought neither well nor ill of--"

She did not complete the sentence--she felt that she blushed, as she
t