t go out at all. She discovered that each Sunday he went twice
to the little American chapel in the Rue de Berri, and she had seen in
his room a small Protestant Bible.

"You read that?" she asked him when she first saw it.

"Yes."

She leaned forward, her look curious, bewildered, even awed.

"And you believe in--God?"

"Yes."

She resumed her former position, but she did not remove her eyes from
his face, and unconsciously she put her hand up to her swelling
throat.

When at length the sitting was over and she left her chair he was
standing before the easel. He turned to her and spoke hesitantly.

"Will you come and look at it?" he asked.

She went and stood where he bade her, and looked. He watched her
anxiously while she did so. For the first moment there was amazement
in her face, then some mysterious emotion he could not comprehend--a
dull red crept slowly over brow and cheek.

She turned upon him.

"Monsieur!" she cried, passionately. "You mock me! It is a bad
picture."

He fell back a pace, staring at her and suddenly trembling with the
shock.

"A bad picture!" he echoed. "_I_ mock you--_I?_"

"It is my face," she said, pointing to it, "but you have made it what
_I_ am not! It is the face of a good woman--of a woman who might be a
saint! Does not _that_ mock me?"

He turned to it with a troubled, dreamy look.

"It is what I have seen in your face," he said in a soft, absent
voice. "It is a truth to me. It is what _I_ have seen."

"It is what no other has seen," she said. "I tell you it mocks me."

"It need not mock you," he answered. "I could not have painted it if I
had not felt it. It is yourself--yourself."

"Myself?" she said. "Do you think, Monsieur, that the men who have
painted me before would know it?"

She gave it another glance and a shrill laugh burst from her, but the
next instant it broke off and ended in another sound. She fell upon
her knees by the empty chair, her open hands flung outward, her sobs
strangling her.

He stood quite near her, looking down.

"I have not thought of anything but my work," he said. "Why should I?"

* * * * *

The following Sunday night the artist Masson met in going down-stairs
a closely veiled figure coming up. He knew it and spoke.

"What, Natalie?" he said. "You? One might fancy you had been to
church."

"I have been," she returned in a cold voice,--"to the church of the
Americans in the Rue de Berri.