way that made it seem to include all others. I hadn't then visited
his country, nor was I proficient in his tongue; but as he was not
so meanly constituted--what Italian is?--as to depend only on that
member for expression he conveyed to me, in familiar but graceful
mimicry, that he was in search of exactly the employment in which
the lady before me was engaged. I was not struck with him at
first, and while I continued to draw I dropped few signs of
interest or encouragement. He stood his ground however--not
importunately, but with a dumb dog-like fidelity in his eyes that
amounted to innocent impudence, the manner of a devoted servant--he
might have been in the house for years--unjustly suspected.
Suddenly it struck me that this very attitude and expression made a
picture; whereupon I told him to sit down and wait till I should be
free. There was another picture in the way he obeyed me, and I
observed as I worked that there were others still in the way he
looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about the high
studio. He might have been crossing himself in Saint Peter's.
Before I finished I said to myself "The fellow's a bankrupt orange-
monger, but a treasure."

When Mrs. Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash
to open the door for her, standing there with the rapt pure gaze of
the young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice. As I never
insisted, in such situations, on the blankness of the British
domestic, I reflected that he had the making of a servant--and I
needed one, but couldn't pay him to be only that--as well as of a
model; in short I resolved to adopt my bright adventurer if he
would agree to officiate in the double capacity. He jumped at my
offer, and in the event my rashness--for I had really known nothing
about him--wasn't brought home to me. He proved a sympathetic