Amouretta’s brilliant blush came and went so often during her story, and finally stayed so long, that it played the very deuce with Maurice’s entire morning; you know how difficult it is to paint emerald satin when the wearer is blushing; the green and the red come to blows. And Maurice, who had two daughters of his own, howbeit small, was really worried, until one afternoon at the Century, Mr. William Saltonstall, long of limb, lineage, and purse,—a man of undoubted probity, and a collector, too!—had touched him on the shoulder, and poured out the whole story of his love for Amouretta. The wedding was to be at Saint Barnaby’s, in June. There could be no doubt as to Mr. Saltonstall’s self-surrender; love at first sight it was, that day in the studio when Maurice had introduced a patron of beauty to beauty herself. Naturally the painter was delighted with this idyl—its delicate fragrance, its perfect flowering; all unconsciously, he himself had sown the seed, his wife and Amouretta smiling wisely thereafter at his blindness. He had always liked William Saltonstall, and none the less because that gentleman was not one whom every one called Bill. After the engagement, Amouretta continued to work, because, valiant little soul, she meant to earn her own trousseau. No man not a relative should be able to say he had done that for her; and I’m thinking it would be a long day before either her father or her brother, in their good-natured shiftlessness, could provide the outfit she had in mind! But there was no June wedding at Saint Barnaby’s, after all; for Amouretta caught a fatal chill one raw night at the Revelries, while posing as Innocence, insufficiently clad in white paint and a scrap of georgette, in one of those pure-white sculpture groups which occasionally reappear in refined vaudeville. And there was nothing more that could ever happen now to Pietro and Amouretta, thought Maurice. For one as for the other, their story of bright youth was ended. For Pietro, no daring assault upon the Roman Prize; for Amouretta, no adventure of any color at all, not even that climax of white satin train and flower-girls at Saint Barnaby’s. Maurice sighed as he took up a large flat brush and charged it with gray paint to obliterate the caricature. A few vigorous strokes would suffice. But he could not bring himself to do what he intended. He started back as if he had hurt himself. Or had young hands pushed him back? Surely there was something in that quaint, brilliant, impudent creature smiling on him—some hint or vestige of that which was once Amouretta—Amouretta who threw a kiss to the world, and was gone. And what was he, successful Maurice Price, that he should go about with brutal paint to hush up forever young Pietro’s jest? No, no, he could not do that. It was not fair, not sportsmanlike. Live and let live!