After that--well, the sittings went on. Not many, of course; Vard was too busy to give me much time. Still, I could have done him ten times over. Never had I found my formula with such ease, such assurance; there were no hesitations, no obstructions--the face was _there_, waiting for me; at times it almost shaped itself on the canvas. Unfortunately Miss Vard was there too ... All this time the papers were busy with the viaduct scandal. The outcry was getting louder. You remember the circumstances? One of Vard’s associates--Bardwell, wasn’t it?--threatened disclosures. The rival machine got hold of him, the Independents took him to their bosom, and the press shrieked for an investigation. It was not the first storm Vard had weathered, and his face wore just the right shade of cool vigilance; he wasn’t the man to fall into the mistake of appearing too easy. His demeanor would have been superb if it had been inspired by a sense of his own strength; but it struck me rather as based on contempt for his antagonists. Success is an inverted telescope through which one’s enemies are apt to look too small and too remote. As for Miss Vard, her serenity was undiminished; but I half-detected a defiance in her unruffled sweetness, and during the last sittings I had the factitious vivacity of a hostess who hears her best china crashing. One day it _did_ crash: the head-lines of the morning papers shouted the catastrophe at me:--“The Monster forced to disgorge--Warrant out against Vard--Bardwell the Boss’s Boomerang”--you know the kind of thing. When I had read the papers I threw them down and went out. As it happened, Vard was to have given me a sitting that morning; but there would have been a certain irony in waiting for him. I wished I had finished the picture--I wished I’d never thought of painting it. I wanted to shake off the whole business, to put it out of my mind, if I could: I had the feeling--I don’t know if I can describe it--that there was a kind of disloyalty to the poor girl in my even acknowledging to myself that I knew what all the papers were howling from the housetops.... I had walked for an hour when it suddenly occurred to me that Miss Vard might, after all, come to the studio at the appointed hour. Why should she? I could conceive of no reason; but the mere thought of what, if she _did_ come, my absence would imply to her, sent me bolting back to Twelfth Street. It was a presentiment, if you like, for she was there. As she rose to meet me a newspaper slipped from her hand: I’d been fool enough, when I went out, to leave the damned things lying all over the place. I muttered some apology for being late, and she said reassuringly: “But my father’s not here yet.” “Your father--?” I could have kicked myself for the way I bungled it! “He went out very early this morning, and left word that he would meet me here at the usual hour.” She faced me, with an eye full of bright courage, across the newspaper lying between us.