"Yes," retorted the other lightly, "I am an old man. It is really a very long time since you posed for me in my little den at Rome." "You remember those days perhaps, sometimes?" she said, dropping the long lashes over her eyes. A shadow passed over Herman's high brow. "Is one likely to forget such days?" he demanded. "Is one likely to forget how love may be turned to treachery and--" "Pardon," the woman interrupted with dignity. "I did not come to be reproached, _eccelenza_. You have not forgotten Signor Hoffmeir?" "No," he answered, with a deepening frown. "I have not forgotten the man who pretended to be my friend and proved it by stealing my betrothed." "It is well that you have not forgotten," Ninitta went on calmly, but earnestly, "for I have a message from him. He charged me when he was dying," she added, crossing herself, "to give it to you with my own hands. I have been waiting for all these years, but now I am free of my promise." Herman took the packet she extended toward him, and turned abruptly away. Ninitta seated herself in one of the tall easy chairs, removed her hat, and began a leisurely survey of the place. The sounds from the wharf outside, the cries of the sailors, the creaking of the cordage and the ships came softened and mellowed like the daylight into the wide, dim studio, giving a certain sense of remoteness by the contrast they suggested between the silence within and the stir of the world without. For all her outward calm, Ninitta's heart was beating hotly, and she longed with a great yearning for a touch from the hand of the silent man before her; for a word of kindness from his lips. She watched him furtively, under cover of looking at a cast of Celini's Perseus upon a bracket above his head, as he stood reading the letter from Hoffmeir. "Why did you not bring this to me before?" the sculptor asked at length, turning towards her. "It is six years now." "Have I been able to shape my life?" returned Ninitta. "I have followed you to Florence, to Paris; you came to America. I followed you to New York; you were here. I have never ceased trying to reach you. It was not easy for me to cross half the world alone and without help; with no friends, no money; with nothing." "But you have been in Boston a couple of months." "Yes," she said quietly, looking up into his face. "But you knew it. I waited for you to send for me." "I have only known it a week," was the sculptor's reply. "Do you know what was in Hoffmeir's letter?" "His ring; the one you wore in Rome." "But do you know what he wrote?" "No," she answered. "How should I?" Her questioner looked at her a moment in silence. She put up her head proudly with an involuntary response to the questioning which his silence implied, and met his eyes unflinchingly. Yet he put his thought into words. "It is seven years since I saw you," he said at length. "It is seven years," she echoed.