‘You must not go away without coming to see my particular den, Fulvia. Come with me now. It is where I oftenest spend my time, so you will know where to think of me. Come with us, won’t you?’ she added, taking Signor Oriole’s hand, and drawing him along with her. They went through the hall to the other side of the house, where were two or three moderately sized rooms opening one out of the other. ‘Here is my sanctum,’ said Minna. ‘I don’t do any more sculpture now--nothing to speak of. That is the almost last real piece of work that I finished--really finished, you know. Do you remember it?’ She pointed with her finger to the bust of Fulvia the girl, and led Fulvia the woman up to it, and made her stand in front of it. For a moment her lips twitched, her eyebrows contracted. She did not speak for some time, but stood quite steadily and motionless before the bust, her hands lightly folded one over the other. At last she said: ‘I am sure it was an excellent likeness. I can see my present features exactly.’ She smiled, and drew her forefinger down the line of her nose. ‘And the eyes and the forehead, and the way the hair grows--it is myself exactly, even now. But the expression! Did I really look such a woebegone, sentimental, lackadaisical creature as that?’ She laughed, and turned inquiringly to Minna, who replied in a slow, sad voice: ‘Yes, you looked even so sad as that; and you felt even so sad as that.’ Again a little impatient shrug of the shoulders, and a smiling ‘Dio mio! I must have been a very depressing companion.’ She turned to find Signor Giuseppe standing just behind her, gazing with intense, wistful earnestness through his spectacles, alternately at her and at the likeness. His face was full of some kind of emotion. She resolutely declined to notice it, but said to Minna: ‘I think it is an awful pity that you do not work any more at such things as this. If you had been a poor woman you would have had to do it, and you would have earned name and fame.’ ‘Possibly,’ replied Minna dryly, as they went out of the room. Fulvia would not sit down again. She said it was high time to get ready for her drive to the station, as she would not miss the train on any account. * * * * *