Maragliano glanced around him with a nervous glance. 'Zere are many people here,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'We cannot talk at leisure. Let us go into my private chamber.' And he led the way into a small parlour behind the studio. Sam took a chair at once with republican promptitude, but Colin stood, his hands folded before him, still abashed by the great man's presence. Maragliano looked at him once more with his keenly interested look. 'That is well,' he said in Italian. 'Greatness always pays the highest homage to greatness. I know a true artist at sight by the way he first approaches me. Rich men condescend; pretenders fawn; ordinary men recognise no superiority save rank or money; but greatness shows its innate reverence at once, and thereby securely earns its own recognition. Be seated, I pray you. Your drawings are wonderful; but you have studied little. They are full of genuine native power, but they lack precise artistic teaching. Where have you taken your first lessons?' 'Nowhere,' Colin answered, his face glowing with pleasure at Maragliano's hearty encomium. 'I am almost entirely self-taught, and I have come to Rome to learn better.' Maragliano listened intently. 'Wonderful!' he said; 'wonderful, truly! And yet, I could almost have guessed it. Your work is all vigour and nature--it is Greek, purely Greek--but there is not yet art in it. Tell me all about how you have learned what you know of sculpture.' Thus invited, Cohn began, and confided to the great sculptor's sympathetic ear the whole story of his youth and boyhood. He began with the time when he moulded little clay images for Minna from the bank at Wootton Mandeville; and he went on with all the story of his acquaintance with Cicolari, down to his coming to Rome with Sir Henry Wilberforce. Maragliano nodded his interest from time to time, and when Colin had finished, he took his hand warmly in his, and cried in English, so that Sam too understood him: 'It is well. You shall be my pupil.' 'And your terms?' Sam asked with mercantile insistence. 'We're ready to agree to anything reasonable.'