"Damnation," cried Blizzard, "you are laughing at me."
Dr. Ferris's face became serious at once. "God forbid that!" he said. "If you have spoken sincerely I feel only sorrow for you and pity--more sorrow and pity for you even than I ever felt before."
"S-s-s-s-t," exclaimed the beggar, and his ears twitched. "She's coming."
"I shall wait," said Dr. Ferris, "and take her uptown, when she has finished working."
"Well," said Blizzard, with a kind of humorous resignation, "I'd kick you out if I could; but I can't." And he added: "You haven't got an extra pair of legs about you, have you?"
"Why!" said Barbara when she saw her father. "Art is looking up. You in a studio!"
Secretly his presence pleased her immensely. She had always hoped that some day he would take enough interest in her work to come to see it uninvited. And she now felt that this had happened. And she thanked Blizzard with sincerity for having waited.
"Mr. Blizzard and I," she told her father, "are doing a bust. And whatever anybody else thinks, we think it's an affair of great importance. Mr. Blizzard even gives me his time and his judgment for nothing."
"Well," Dr. Ferris smiled, "I am willing to give you the latter, on the same terms. May I see what you've done?"
Barbara removed the cloths from the bust, and so life-like and tragic was the face which suddenly confronted him that Dr. Ferris, instead of stepping forward to examine it closely, stepped backward as if he had been struck. And then: