She wondered if he would not ask her some questions regarding herself, but he did not. "He does not care to know," she thought sullenly. And then she told herself that he did know, and a mocking devil of a smile settled on her lip and was there when he turned toward her again. But the time never came when his manner altered, when he was less candid and gentle, or less grateful for the favor she was bestowing upon him. She scarcely knew how it was that she first began to know the sound of his foot upon the stairway and to listen for it. Her earliest consciousness of it was when once she awakened suddenly out of a dead sleep at night and found herself sitting upright with her hand upon her heavily throbbing heart. "What is it?" she cried in a loud whisper. But she spoke only to herself and the darkness. She knew what it was and did not lie down again until the footsteps had reached the top of the last flight and the door above had opened and closed. The time arrived when there was scarcely a trifling incident in his everyday life which escaped her. She saw each sign of his poverty and physical weakness. He grew paler day by day. There were days when his step flagged as he went up and down the staircase; some mornings he did not go out at all. She discovered that each Sunday he went twice to the little American chapel in the Rue de Berri, and she had seen in his room a small Protestant Bible. "You read that?" she asked him when she first saw it. "Yes." She leaned forward, her look curious, bewildered, even awed. "And you believe in--God?" "Yes." She resumed her former position, but she did not remove her eyes from his face, and unconsciously she put her hand up to her swelling throat. When at length the sitting was over and she left her chair he was standing before the easel. He turned to her and spoke hesitantly. "Will you come and look at it?" he asked. She went and stood where he bade her, and looked. He watched her anxiously while she did so. For the first moment there was amazement in her face, then some mysterious emotion he could not comprehend--a dull red crept slowly over brow and cheek. She turned upon him. "Monsieur!" she cried, passionately. "You mock me! It is a bad picture." He fell back a pace, staring at her and suddenly trembling with the shock. "A bad picture!" he echoed. "_I_ mock you--_I?_" "It is my face," she said, pointing to it, "but you have made it what _I_ am not! It is the face of a good woman--of a woman who might be a saint! Does not _that_ mock me?" He turned to it with a troubled, dreamy look. "It is what I have seen in your face," he said in a soft, absent voice. "It is a truth to me. It is what _I_ have seen." "It is what no other has seen," she said. "I tell you it mocks me." "It need not mock you," he answered. "I could not have painted it if I had not felt it. It is yourself--yourself." "Myself?" she said. "Do you think, Monsieur, that the men who have painted me before would know it?"