“Do you hear?  Do you hear them?”

He made a motion with his lips to speak but they hurt him too much.  So he nodded:  that he heard them.

A moment later he tugged at the bandage over his eyes.

She sprang toward him: 

“O my precious one, you must not tear the bandage off your eyes!”

“I want to see you!” he mumbled.  “It has been so long since I saw you!  What’s the matter with you?  Where are your hands?  Why don’t you put your arms around me?”

VI

The class had been engaged with another model.  Their work was forced and listless.  As days passed without the mother’s return, their thought and their talk concerned itself more and more with her disappearance.  Why had she not come back?  What had befallen her?  What did it all mean?  Would they ever know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work, the teacher of the class entered.  He looked shocked; his look shocked them; instant sympathy ran through them.  He spoke with difficulty: 

“She has come back.  She is down-stairs.  Something had befallen her indeed.  She told me as briefly as possible and I tell you all I know.  Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral choir school was run over in the street.  A mention of it—­the usual story—­was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers?  They bore us; they are not even news.  He was taken to St. Luke’s, and she has been at St. Luke’s, and the end came at St. Luke’s, and all the time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it.  Such is New York!  It was to help pay for his education in music that she first came to us, she said.  And it was the news that he had been chosen for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw brighten her day by day.  Now she comes again for the same small wage, but with other need, no doubt:  the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for his breast.  She told me this calmly as though it caused her no grief.  It was not my privilege, it is not our privilege, to share her unutterable bereavement.

“She has asked to go on with the sittings.  I have told her to come to-morrow.  But she does not realize all that this involves with the portrait.  You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new work.  She is in mourning.  Her hands will have to be left out, she has hurt them; they are bandaged.  The new portrait will be of the head and face only.  But the chief reason is the change of expression.  The light which was in her face and which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out.  The old look is gone.  It is gone, and will never come back—­the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee—­that great earthly beacon-light in women of ages past.  It was brutally put out