’Just to show you that it is not for the sake of the picture that I come here.  Clara—­’ Then the door was opened, and Isaac appeared, nature could pile no more.  Conway Dalrymple, who had made his way almost up to Clara’s seat, turned round sharply towards his easel, in anger, at having been disturbed.  He should have been more grateful for all that his Isaac had done for him, and have recognised the fact that the fault had been with himself.  Mrs Broughton had been twelve minutes out of the room.  She had counted them to be fifteen—­having no doubt made a mistake as to three—­and had told herself that with such a one as Conway Dalrymple, with so much of the work ready done to his hand for him, fifteen minutes should have been amply sufficient.  When we reflect what her own thoughts must have been during the interval—­what it is to have to pile up such fagots as those, how she was, as it were, giving away a fresh morsel of her own heart during each minute that she allowed Clara and Conway Dalrymple to remain together, it cannot surprise us that her eyes should have become dizzy, and that she should not have counted the minutes with accurate correctness.  Dalrymple turned to his picture angrily, but Miss Van Siever kept her seat and did not show the slightest emotion.

‘My friends,’ said Mrs Broughton, ’this will not do.  This is not working; this is not sitting.’

’Mr Dalrymple had been explaining to me the precarious nature of an artist’s profession,’ said Clara.

‘It is not precarious with him,’ said Mrs Dobbs Broughton, sententiously.

’Not in a general way, perhaps; but to prove the truth of his words he was going to treat Jael worse than Jael treats Sisera.’

‘I was going to slit the picture from the top to the bottom.’

‘And why?’ said Mrs Broughton, putting her hands to heaven in tragic horror.

‘Just to show Miss Van Siever how little I care about it.’

‘And how little you care about her, too,’ said Mrs Broughton.

‘She might take that as she like.’  After this there was another genuine sitting, and the real work went on as though there had been no episode.  Jael fixed her face, and held her hammer as though her mind and heart were solely bent on seeming to be slaying Sisera.  Dalrymple turned his eyes from the canvas to the model, and from the model to the canvas, working with his hand all the while, as though that last pathetic ‘Clara’ had never been uttered; and Mrs Dobbs Broughton reclined on a sofa, looking at them and thinking of her own singularly romantic position, till her mind was filled with a poetic frenzy.  In one moment she resolved that she would hate Clara as a woman was never hated by woman; and then there were daggers, and poison-cups, and strangling cords in her eye.  In the next she was as firmly determined that she would love Mrs Conway Dalrymple as woman was never loved by woman; and then she saw herself kneeling by a cradle, and tenderly nursing a baby, of which Conway was to be the father and Clara the mother.  And so she went to sleep.