to take no liberties; partly because it would have been indelicate, and partly because it would have been vain.  He contented himself with feeling that the young girl was still as vivid an image in his memory as she had been five days after he left her, and with drifting nearer and nearer to the impression that at just that crisis any other girl would have answered Roderick’s sentimental needs as well.  Any other girl indeed would do so still!  Roderick had confessed as much to him at Geneva, in saying that he had been taking at Baden the measure of his susceptibility to female beauty.

His extraordinary success in modeling the bust of the beautiful Miss Light was pertinent evidence of this amiable quality.  She sat to him, repeatedly, for a fortnight, and the work was rapidly finished.  On one of the last days Roderick asked Rowland to come and give his opinion as to what was still wanting; for the sittings had continued to take place in Mrs. Light’s apartment, the studio being pronounced too damp for the fair model.  When Rowland presented himself, Christina, still in her white dress, with her shoulders bare, was standing before a mirror, readjusting her hair, the arrangement of which, on this occasion, had apparently not met the young sculptor’s approval.  He stood beside her, directing the operation with a peremptoriness of tone which seemed to Rowland to denote a considerable advance in intimacy.  As Rowland entered, Christina was losing patience.  “Do it yourself, then!” she cried, and with a rapid movement unloosed the great coil of her tresses and let them fall over her shoulders.

They were magnificent, and with her perfect face dividing their rippling flow she looked like some immaculate saint of legend being led to martyrdom.  Rowland’s eyes presumably betrayed his admiration, but her own manifested no consciousness of it.  If Christina was a coquette, as the remarkable timeliness of this incident might have suggested, she was not a superficial one.

“Hudson ’s a sculptor,” said Rowland, with warmth.  “But if I were only a painter!”

“Thank Heaven you are not!” said Christina.  “I am having quite enough of this minute inspection of my charms.”

“My dear young man, hands off!” cried Mrs. Light, coming forward and seizing her daughter’s hair.  “Christina, love, I am surprised.”

“Is it indelicate?” Christina asked.  “I beg Mr. Mallet’s pardon.”  Mrs. Light gathered up the dusky locks and let them fall through her fingers, glancing at her visitor with a significant smile.  Rowland had never been in the East, but if he had attempted to make a sketch of an old slave-merchant, calling attention to the “points” of a Circassian beauty, he would have depicted such a smile as Mrs. Light’s.  “Mamma ’s not really shocked,” added Christina in a moment, as if she had guessed her mother’s by-play.  “She is only afraid that Mr. Hudson might have injured my hair, and that, per consequenza, I should sell for less.”