“Do you remember Sacharissa?” she asked.

“I do—­certainly!  I always thought——­”

“What?” she said, smiling.

He muttered something about eyes and white skin and a trick of the heavy lids.

She was perfectly at ease now; she leaned back in her chair, studying him calmly.

“Suppose,” she said, “people could see me here now.”

“It would end your artistic career,” he replied, laughing; “and fancy!  I took you for the sort that painted for a bare existence!”

“And I—­I took you for——­”

“Something very different than what I am.”

“In one way—­not in others.”

“Oh!  I look the mountebank?”

“I shall not explain what I mean,” she said with heightened color, and rose from her chair.  “As there are no more green mice to peep out at me from behind my easel,” she added, “I can have no excuse from abandoning art any longer.  Can I?”

The trailing sweetness of the inquiry was scarcely a challenge, yet he dared take it up.

“You asked me,” he said, “whether you could do anything for me.”

“Can I?” she exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“I will—­I am glad—­tell me what to do?”

“Why, it’s only this.  I’ve got to go before an audience of two hundred people and do things.  I’ve had practice here by myself, but—­but if you don’t mind I should like to try it before somebody—­you.  Do you mind?”

She stood there, slim, blue-eyed, reflecting; then innocently:  “If I’ve compromised myself the damage was done long ago, wasn’t it?  They’re going to take away my studio anyhow, so I might as well have as much pleasure as I can.”

And she sat down, gracefully, linking her white fingers over her knees.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

IV

AN IDEAL IDOL

A Chapter Devoted to the Proposition that All Mankind Are Born of Woman

He began by suddenly filling the air with canary birds; they flew and chirped and fluttered about her head, until, bewildered, she shrank back, almost frightened at the golden hurricane.

To reassure her he began doing incredible things with the big silver hoops, forming chains and linked figures under her amazed eyes, although each hoop seemed solid and without a break in its polished circumference.  Then, one by one, he tossed the rings up and they vanished in mid-air before her very eyes.

“How did you do that?” she cried, enchanted.

He laughed and produced the big, white Persian cats, changed them into kittens, then into birds and butterflies, and finally into a bowl full of big, staring goldfish.  Then he picked up a ladle, dipped out the fish, carefully fried them over an electric lamp, dumped them from the smoking frying pan back into the water, where they quietly swam off again, goggling their eyes in astonishment.