Anastase Gouache worked hard at the Cardinal's portrait, and at the same time did his best to satisfy Donna Tullia.

The latter, indeed, was not easily pleased, and Gouache found it hard to instil into his representation of her the precise amount of poetry she required, without doing violence to his own artistic sense of fitness.

But the other picture progressed rapidly.

The Cardinal was a restless man, and after the first two or three sittings, desired nothing so much as to be done with them altogether.

Anastase amused him, it is true, and the statesman soon perceived that he had made a conquest of the young man's mind, and that, as Giovanni Saracinesca had predicted, he had helped Gouache to come to a decision.