There was an army of servants, male and female, and the three ladies were attended with as much state as if the king were present.
Between breakfast and dinner Margaret worked.
Art is a jealous mistress; she will not share her shrine with any other god, though it be Cupid himself. If Margaret had remained the happy wife of Lord Blair, it is a question whether any more pictures of worth would have left her easel, but now, with her great sorrow ever present with her, she felt that her work alone would bring her partial forgetfulness.
And she did work. At first she thought she would paint a view of Florence from the hills, and she made a very fair sketch; but, about a week after her arrival at the villa she was sitting before a fresh canvas, and, her thoughts flying back to the past, she, all unwittingly, took up the charcoal and began to draw the outline of the Long Rock at Appleford. It was not until she had sketched in the whole of the scene that she became conscious of what she was doing; and when she had so become conscious, she took up her brush to wipe the marks out. Then she hesitated. A desire to paint the scene took possession of her, and she went on with it.
She painted the rock, with the sea raging round it, and the sky threatening it from above; and, as she painted, the whole scene came back to her, just as a scene which a novelist has witnessed with his own eyes comes back to him.
And as the picture grew, it exerted a fascination for her which she could not repel.
On this she worked day after day, carefully locking up the unfinished picture in the mahogany case which the prince had supplied with the rest of the furniture of the studio.
She felt that she could do nothing until it was finished. One day the princess knocked at the door, and Margaret, before she opened it, hurriedly inclosed the canvas in its mahogany case.
"Why, you have shut your picture up," said the princess in a tone of disappointment.