"I thank you, young man. You have saved my best horse. But for you I should have stabbed him. You are an artist?" "At your service, Your Highness." "Your art is beautiful, and you alone know how it suits you. But much honor, perhaps also wealth and fame, can be gained among my troopers. Will you enlist?" "No, Your Highness," replied Ulrich, with a low bow. "If I were not an artist, I should like best to be a soldier; but I cannot give up my art." "Right, right! Yet....do you think your cure of Satan will be lasting; or will the dance begin again to-morrow?" "Perhaps so; but grant me a week, Your Highness, and the swarthy fellows can easily manage him. An hour's training like this every morning, and the work will be accomplished. Satan will scarcely be transformed into an angel, but probably will become a perfectly steady horse." "If you succeed," replied Don Juan, joyously, "you will greatly oblige me. Come to me next week. If you bring good tidings.... consider meantime, how I can serve you." Ulrich did not need to consider long. A week would pass swiftly, and then--then the king's brother should send him to Italy. Even his enemies knew that he was liberal and magnanimous. The week passed away, the horse was tamed and bore the saddle quietly. Don Juan received Ulrich's petition kindly, and invited him to make the journey on the admiral's galley, with the king's ambassador and his secretary, de Soto. The very same day the happy artist obtained a bill of exchange on a house on the Rialto, and now it was settled, he was going to Italy. Coello was obliged to submit, and his kind heart again showed itself; for he wrote letters of introduction for Ulrich to his old artist friends in Venice, and induced the king to send the great Titian a present--which the ambassador was to deliver. The court-artist obtained from the latter a promise to present his pupil Navarrete to the grey-Haired prince of artists. Everything was now ready for departure; Ulrich again packed his belongings in the studio, but with very different feelings from the first time. He was a man, he now knew what the right "word" was, life lay open before him, and the paradise of Art was about to unclose its gates. The studies he had finished in Madrid aroused his compassion; in Italy he would first really begin to become an artist: there work must bring him what it had here denied: satisfaction, success! Gay as a boy, half frantic with joy, happiness and expectation, he crushed the sketches, which seemed to him too miserable, into the waste-paper basket with a maul-stick. During this work of destruction, Isabella entered the room.