At last, perceiving her so completely absorbed in her work, his
attention was aroused.

"What is the matter with you, that you don't open your lips?" he said.
"Are you so taken up with the copying of those flowers that you can't
speak?"

This was another of the labors which he often intrusted to her--to
make drawings, aquarelles, and pastels, which he afterward used in his
works as plates. Thus, for the past five years he had been making some
curious experiments on a collection of hollyhocks; he had obtained a
whole series of new colorings by artificial fecundations. She made
these sorts of copies with extraordinary minuteness, an exactitude of
design and of coloring so extreme that he marveled unceasingly at the
conscientiousness of her work, and he often told her that she had a
"good, round, strong, clear little headpiece."

But, this time, when he approached her to look over her shoulder, he
uttered a cry of comic fury.

"There you are at your nonsense! Now you are off in the clouds again!
Will you do me the favor to tear that up at once?"

She straightened herself, her cheeks flushed, her eyes aglow with the
delight she took in her work, her slender fingers stained with the red
and blue crayon that she had crushed.

"Oh, master!"

And in this "master," so tender, so caressingly submissive, this term