He stood his ground however--not importunately, but with a dumb dog-like fidelity in his eyes that amounted to innocent impudence, the manner of a devoted servant--he might have been in the house for years--unjustly suspected.

Suddenly it struck me that this very attitude and expression made a picture; whereupon I told him to sit down and wait till I should be free.

There was another picture in the way he obeyed me, and I observed as I worked that there were others still in the way he looked wonderingly, with his head thrown back, about the high studio.

He might have been crossing himself in Saint Peter's.
Before I finished I said to myself "The fellow's a bankrupt orange-monger, but a treasure." When Mrs.Monarch withdrew he passed across the room like a flash to open the door for her, standing there with the rapt pure gaze of the young Dante spellbound by the young Beatrice.

As I never insisted, in such situations, on the blankness of the British domestic, I reflected that he had the making of a servant--and I needed one, but couldn't pay him to be only that--as well as of a model; in short I resolved to adopt my bright adventurer if he would agree to officiate in the double capacity.