She did not think it necessary to tell him more than that she was now occupied every day by nursing duties in a sick-room, and that it was consequently out of her power to attend at the studio.  Luca Lomi expressed, and evidently felt, great disappointment at her failing him as a model, and tried hard to persuade her that she might find time enough, if she chose, to sit to him, as well as to nurse the sick person.  The more she resisted his arguments and entreaties, the more obstinately he reiterated them.  He was dusting his favorite busts and statues, after his long absence, with a feather-brush when she came in; and he continued this occupation all the while he was talking—­urging a fresh plea to induce Nanina to reconsider her refusal to sit at every fresh piece of sculpture he came to, and always receiving the same resolute apology from her as she slowly followed him down the studio toward the door.

Arriving thus at the lower end of the room, Luca stopped with a fresh argument on his lips before his statue of Minerva.  He had dusted it already, but he lovingly returned to dust it again.  It was his favorite work—­the only good likeness (although it did assume to represent a classical subject) of his dead daughter that he possessed.  He had refused to part with it for Maddalena’s sake; and, as he now approached it with his brush for the second time, he absently ceased speaking, and mounted on a stool to look at the face near and blow some specks of dust off the forehead.  Nanina thought this a good opportunity of escaping from further importunities.  She was on the point of slipping away to the door with a word of farewell, when a sudden exclamation from Luca Lomi arrested her.

“Plaster!” cried the master-sculptor, looking intently at that part of the hair of the statue which lay lowest on the forehead.  “Plaster here!” He took out his penknife as he spoke, and removed a tiny morsel of some white substance from an interstice between two folds of the hair where it touched the face.  “It is plaster!” he exclaimed, excitedly.  “Somebody has been taking a cast from the face of my statue!”

He jumped off the stool, and looked all round the studio with an expression of suspicious inquiry.  “I must have this cleared up,” he said.  “My statues were left under Rocco’s care, and he is answerable if there has been any stealing of casts from any one of them.  I must question him directly.”

Nanina, seeing that he took no notice of her, felt that she might now easily effect her retreat.  She opened the studio door, and repeated, for the twentieth time at least, that she was sorry she could not sit to him.

“I am sorry too, child,” he said, irritably looking about for his hat.  He found it apparently just as Nanina was going out; for she heard him call to one of the workmen in the inner studio, and order the man to say, if anybody wanted him, that he had gone to Father Rocco’s lodgings.