‘Ah, it is you!’ said the padrona; but she did not turn round for the moment, or take any further notice of him. This third studio was not like any of the others. It was much barer, and, indeed, poorer. There was in it none of the classic wealth of casts and friezes which adorned Laurie’s sanctuary. There were no pictures in it, as in Mr. Welby’s stately studio. Had the padrona possessed ebony cabinets inlaid with silver, or a rare Angelichino, no doubt she would have sold them for some mean-spirited consideration of Alice’s music-lessons, or a month at the seaside for the bundle of children whose pleasure was more to her, alas! though she was a painter, than all the pictures in the world. There were some prints only on the walls, grey-green here as elsewhere throughout the house--prints of Raphael’s Madonnas--she of San Sisto within reach of the painter’s eye as she worked, and she of Fogligno, in her maturer splendour, on the mantel-piece; but there was a great dearth of the usual ‘materials’ with which an artist’s studio abounds. The padrona’s work was of a kind which did not require much consultation of examples; her draperies were chiefly modern, her subject the ever-varying child-life, which she had under her eye. A little lay-figure, which little Edith called her wooden sister, was in a corner, dressed--alas! for art--in one of Edith’s frocks, considerably torn and ragged, which was about the highest touch of effect Mrs. Severn permitted herself. There was something curious altogether in the commonplace, untechnical air of the room. It is the defect of women in general when they adopt a profession to be rather too technical; but the padrona took her own way. She had given in so far, however, to the use and wont of the craft as to wear a grey garment over her gown, which fitted very nicely, and looked as well as if it had been the gown itself. She was a middle-sized woman, fully developed, and not girlish in any way, though her face had the youthfulness of a gay temperament and elastic disposition. Her eyes were hazel, with a great deal of light in them; her mouth full of laughter and merriment, except when she was thinking, and then it might perhaps be a trifle too firm; her hair brown, and soft, and abundant. Laurie sat in the fauteuil and watched her taking the good of the last remnant of the light with a curious mixture of kindness and admiration, and a kind of envy. ‘If I could but go at it like that!’ he said to himself, knowing that had he been in her place he would so gladly have thrown down his brush on the pleasant excuse of a visitor. There was a certain professional ease in the way he seated himself to wait her leisure, such as perhaps could have been bred in none other but this atmosphere, softly touched with the odour of pigments, and with the lay figure in the corner. Literature has less of this brotherhood of mutual comprehension--at least, in England--being a