“Did you ever pose for any one?” she asked.

“Yes, miss.”

“I should like to make a bust of you.  I’ll see that it pays you better than—­better than earning a living this way.”

For the first time Blizzard smiled.  “Do you want me to come now?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said.  “My studio is in No. 17 McBurney Place.”  Here she stopped upon a somewhat embarrassing thought.  But the legless man read what was in her mind.

“Two flights up?” he queried.  “Three?  I can climb.  Don’t trouble about that.”

“You will come as soon as you can?”

“I have to meet a man here in half an hour.  Then I’ll come.”

“Please,” she said, “ask for Miss Ferris.”

[Illustration:  She took some coins from her purse and dropped them into the tin cup]

At the name a tremor went through the legless man from head to stump.  He blanched, and for the thousandth part of a second all that was devil in him rushed with smouldering lights to his eyes.  But of this Barbara perceived nothing; her repugnance mastered, she had already brightly smiled, nodded, and was walking swiftly away, her head high, spring air in her lungs and inspiration in her heart.

The beggar’s eyes playing upon her, she passed through the peaceful warm sunshine of the quiet old square, and vanished at last into the still brighter sunshine and still older quiet of McBurney Place.

To work with her own hands, at least until she had made something beautiful, seemed to her a better aim than any other which the world offers.  She had at first been the victim of private lessons, amusedly approved by her father, and only intermittently attended by herself, since it is not in a day that a fashionable idler is turned into a steadily toiling aspirant for eternal honors.  Just so long as she remained an amateur and occasional potterer in her father’s house she was applauded by him and assumed by the world in general to be a very talented young lady; but when, her artistic impulses—­if not her technique—­having strengthened amazingly, she insisted upon the steadier routine of an art school, she met with an opposition as narrow, it seemed to her, as it was firm.  Her own will in the matter, however, proved the stronger.  And having passed with excellent rapidity through those grades of the school in which the student is taught to make cubes and spheres, she modelled from the antique, and at last, upon a day almost sacred in her memory, was promoted to the life class.

And here, one morning, Dr. Ferris, interested in spite of himself in her swift progress, found her, with a number of other young ladies and gentlemen, earnestly at work making, from different angles of vision, greenish clay statuettes of a handsome young Italian laborer who had upon his person no clothes whatever.  That fastidious surgeon, to whom naked bodies, and indeed naked hearts, could have been nothing new, was