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He approached her. He waited. The Bambino lay with its wooden face staring at the ceiling. It was a crisis for them all. The next move would determine everything. He must not risk too much, again. The picture–art–hung on her sobs. Lover–artist? He paused a second too long.

She turned toward him slowly, serenely. Her glance fell across him, level and tranquil. The traces of ignored tears lay in smiling drops on her face. The softened scorn played across it. “Shall we finish the sitting?” she asked, in a conventional voice.

He took up his brush uncertainly. She seated herself, gathering up the scattered work. For a few moments she sewed rapidly. Then the soft fabric fell to her lap. She sat looking before her, unconscious, except that her glance seemed to rest now and then on the fallen figure in its fragments of glass.

For two hours he worked feverishly, painting with swiftest skill and power. At times he caught his breath at the revelation in the face. He was too alert to be human. The artist forgot the woman. Faithfully, line by line, he laid bare her heart. She sat unmoved. When at last, from sheer weariness, the brush dropped from his hand, she stepped from the model-stand, and stood at his side. She looked at the canvas attentively. The inscrutable look of the painted face seemed but a faint reflex of the living one.

“You have succeeded well,” she said at last. “We will omit the Bambino.”

She moved slowly, graciously, toward the door, gathering the fragile sewing as she went. He started toward her–suddenly conscious of her power–a man again. A parting of the draperies arrested them. It was Salai, his face agitated, looking from the lady to the painter, inarticulate.

“The Signor”–he gasped–“his horse–they bring him–dead.”

She stirred slightly where she stood. Her eyelids fell. “Go, Salai. Await your master’s commands in the hall below.”

She turned to the painter as the draperies closed. “I trust that you will make all use of our service, Signor Leonardo, in removing from the palace. The apartments will, I fear, be needed for relatives. They will come to honor the dead.”

He stood for a moment stupefied, aghast at her control of practical, feminine detail; then moved toward her. “Lisa—-“

She motioned toward the easel. “Payment for the picture will be sent you soon.”

“The picture goes with me. It is not finished.”

“It is well.” She bowed mockingly. The little door swung noiselessly behind her. He was left alone with the portrait. It was looking sideways at the fallen Bambino amid the shattered fragments on the floor.

II

It was the French monarch. He fluttered restlessly about the studio, urbane, enthusiastic. He paused to finger some ingenious toy, to praise some drawing or bit of sunlit color that caught his fancy. The painter, smiling at the frank enthusiasm, followed leisurely from room to room. The wandering Milanese villa was a treasure house. Bits of marble and clay, curious mechanical contrivances, winged creatures, bats and creeping things mingled with the canvases. Color and line ran riot on the walls. A few finished pieces had been placed on easels, in convenient light, for the royal inspection. Each of these, in turn, the volatile monarch had exalted. He had declared that everything in the villa, including the gifted owner, must return with him to France.

“That is the place for men like you!” he exclaimed, standing before a small, exquisitely finished Madonna. “What do these Milanese know of art? Or the Florentines, for that matter? Your ‘Last Supper’–I saw it last week. It is a blur. Would that the sainted Louis might have taken it bodily, stone by stone, to our France, as he longed to do. You will see; the mere copy has more honor with us than the original here. Come with us,” he added persuasively, laying his hand on the painter’s shabby sleeve.

The painter looked down from his height on the royal suitor. “You do me too much honor, sire. I am an old man.”