This conversation, being in English, was not understood by the model, who stood stupid, and straight, and tired, trying to look picturesque. The artist considered a minute, then said abruptly: “Put down the vase, not on the floor, but in a chair.” She obeyed. “Now take it up――slowly――and stop the instant I tell you.” She bent her strong and supple figure a little, and began lifting the vase. “Stop there!” he called out, “and look up at me. Look as pretty as you can. Think that I am some _giovanotto_ who is going, perhaps, to ask you of your mother.” Half shy, half saucy, she looked up as commanded, gratified vanity and friendly regard uniting to give her face as much expression as it was capable of. Carlin seized his pencil and began sketching rapidly. “He hasn’t a particle of imagination,” the Signora said in a low tone, “but he has excellent eyes and much humor. I sometimes think that humor and imagination never go together. Indeed, I don’t believe they ever do in any superlative degree.” A little bell sounded timidly at her side, pulled by a cord that she perceived now by its vibration coming in at the window, the bell itself being quite hidden by the vine-leaves, where it was held between two large nails driven into the window-frame. “Would――you――be so very kind――as to throw――that――loaf of bread out of the window, Signora?” the artist asked, abstractedly dropping one word at a time between the strokes of his pencil and glances at his model, whose fire was beginning to fade. “I can’t stop.” The lady looked at him in wonder. “It’s a beggar,” he explained after a moment, scratching away rapidly. “I can’t be bothered with them in here.” She looked out of the window as well as she could for the leaves, and saw an arm in a ragged coat-sleeve, and a hand stretching toward the wall, and, at the same instant, the bell rang in her very ear with a force that made her start back. The bread was on a little shelf near by, an old knife beside it. She prudently cut the loaf in two, and dropped half to the unseen mendicant. “That’s just like Carlin!” she exclaimed. “I don’t suppose any one else would think of rigging up a beggars’ bell.” “I shall know where to go when I want bread,” she said aloud, seeing him pause in his work. “It will be only to come under your window, pull a string, and hold up my apron.” “Oh! by the way, please to pull in the string,” he added. “I never let it hang out, except when I have made an appointment. I told him to come if he didn’t get anything for dinner. Said he hadn’t eaten anything for twenty-four hours. It’s a disagreeable thing to go twenty-four hours without eating.”