Maurice’s smile faded away into mere pensiveness as he recalled both Pietro and Amouretta. The boy, in all his vivid brightness of youth, had died suddenly from the epidemic in which Maurice himself had suffered, while Amouretta— Her real name was not Amouretta. No one’s is. She was just Anna McGowan, golden and rosy, with hair and complexion that would have been beyond belief if she had not insisted on showing every artist (and more especially his wife) just how far her hair fell below her knees and just how it grew around her temples; because, as she said, it was where the hair started and where it left off that all that nasty peroxide business gave those others away, poor things! Also, she would press her finger on her cheek and lips, so that their roses would vanish and return, as if an electric button had been touched. She loved to have the wives see that, too. There was nothing false about Amouretta. From her golden topknot to her pink toes, she was as good a girl, all in all, as ever hopped high-heeled from a painter’s studio to a picture-studio (two quite different arenas), in the effort to make both ends meet, and then cross over. “It’s the cross-over that counts,” Amouretta used to say; “there’s where the joy in life appears.” The name Amouretta was a business concession to the picture industry and to the small vaudeville shows in which she worked when posing was slack. A singularly vivid personality, that child; her adventures, like her hair and her complexion, sometimes seemed fabulous, at first glance, but always gained new lustre after investigation. For instance, there was on her shoulder a tiny red mark, which she said was due to a bite she had received at the Kilkenny Ball, from a mad and anonymous devotee of beauty. Could any one altogether believe that? Nevertheless, young Cavendish (whom she had never known or even seen), on coming to himself the day after, had confessed himself publicly, in an agony of shame. He had taken a bite of a peach in passing; he didn’t know why, Lord help him; and from that hour he was nevermore the strayed reveller we once had known, but settled down into blameless and uninteresting eclipse. Then again, there came a morning when Amouretta, posing in a green satin bodice as an understudy for an overworked “bud,” whose portrait Maurice Price was painting, had yielded to that self-revealing mood to which all models are at times given; she confided to our painter that she was engaged to be married to a middle-aged admirer, a man of great wealth, whose name she would not tell until the engagement was publicly announced. Could not Mr. Price guess? She meant to give up both stage and model-stand, of course; why, she had given up cigarettes already for that man, because he had said that the men of his family didn’t like them for ladies. “And he was so dear, when he said it.”