Felix made a wide circuit to avoid him, and stood looking at him on the other side of the street in the shadow of the houses. For a good half hour he saw his friend opposite continue at his post. Then the window was closed by a heavy curtain, and, immediately after, the watcher at the gate tore himself away and departed slowly. Felix did not follow him. He scorned to be a spy on the secret ways of his friend. What chance had disclosed to him gave him enough to think about for to-day, without being able to find a solution to the riddle. _BOOK II_. CHAPTER I. It was unusually still in Angelica's studio, so still that one could plainly hear, through the thin wall that separated her from her neighbor, the cheerful squeak of his white mice. This was always a sign that their master was, as he expressed it, on the rampage, wielding his brush in the thick of the battle of Lützen. Angelica, too, was very busy. But although she usually liked to chat over her work, to keep the people who sat to her from falling asleep, to-day she rarely opened her lips. It was the last sitting; the last touch, which, after all, is always a new beginning, was to be given to the picture--every stroke of the brush decided the fate of a _nuance_, the success or failure of an expression. In order to work more surely, she had put on a pair of spectacles, that can scarcely be said to have improved her appearance, and the painting-jacket, on the left sleeve of which she was accustomed to wipe her brush, had burst open in the ardor of her work, and, with her lance-like maulstick and her shield-like palate, gave a certain pugnacious aspect to her good, honest face, as if she were engaged in a struggle for the release of the enchanted princess who sat in a chair opposite her, and who was also unusually quiet. Whether Julie was turning over in her mind some especially serious thought, or had, like all people sitting to a painter, merely fallen under the influence of a certain absent-minded melancholy, it was impossible to make out. She was especially beautiful to-day. Instead of her raw-silk dress, she wore a lighter stuff of transparent black, through which gleamed her white neck. Angelica had planned this in order that all the light might be concentrated on the face; and the arrangement of the hair, which left the contour of the head fully visible and allowed a few simply-braided locks to flow over the shoulders, was a special invention of the artist. Now, in the steady light, the dead white of her complexion, and the soft blond of her hair, shone out so gently subdued and yet so clear, and the eyes, under the brown lashes, had, with all their softness, such a fiery sparkle, that one could appreciate Angelica's assertion that a thing of this sort could not be painted--gold, pearls, and sapphires were the only materials with which to rival this fusion of color.