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waves precisely in the same way. Would you really allow me—I won’t make you untidy?’
    And before Miss Poster could resist, Mrs. Burgoyne had put up her deft hands, and in a moment, with a pull here, and the alteration of a hairpin there, she had loosened the girl’s black and silky hair, till it showed the beautiful waves above the ear in which it did indeed resemble the marble head with a curious closeness.
    ‘I can put it back in a moment. But oh—that is so charming! Aunt Pattie!’
    Miss Manisty looked up from a newspaper which had just arrived.
    ‘My dear!—that was bold of you I But indeed it
is
charming! I think I would forgive you if I were Miss Foster.
    The girl felt herself gently turned towards the mirror that rose behind the Greek head. With pink cheeks she too looked at herself for a moment. Then in a shyness beyond speech, she lifted her hands.
    ‘Must you’—said Mrs. Burgoyne appealingly. ‘I know one doesn’t like to be untidy. But it isn’t really the least untidy—It is only delightful—perfectly delightful!’
    Her voice, her manner charmed the girl’s annoyance.
    ‘If you like it’—she said, hesitating—‘But it will come down!’
    ‘I like it terribly—and it will not think of coming down! Let me show you Mr. Manisty’s latest purchase.’
    And, slipping her arm inside Miss Foster’s, Mrs. Burgoyne dexterously turned her away from the glass, and brought her to the large central table, where a vivid charcoal sketch, supported on a small easel, rose among the litter of books.
    It represented an old old man carried in a chair on the shoulders of a crowd of attendants and guards. Soldiers in curved helmets, courtiers in short velvet cloaks and ruffs, priests in floating vestments pressed about him—a dim vast multitude stretched into the distance. The old man wore a high cap with three lines about it; his thin and shrunken form was enveloped in a gorgeous robe. The face, infinitely old, was concentrated in the sharply smiling eyes, the long, straight, secret mouth. His arm, supporting with difficulty the weight of the robe, was raised,—the hand blessed. On either side of him rose great fans of white ostrich feathers, and the old man among them was whiter than they, spectrally white from head to foot, save for the triple cap, and the devices on his robe. But into his emaciation, his weakness, the artist had thrown a triumph, a force that thrilled the spectator. The small figure, hovering above the crowd, seemed in truth to have nothing to do with it, to be alone with the huge spaces—arch on arch—dome on dome—of the vast church through which it was being borne.—
    ‘Do you know who it is?’ asked Mrs. Burgoyne, smiling.
    ‘The—the Pope?’ said Miss Foster, wondering.
    ‘Isn’t it clever? It is by one of your compatriots, an American artist in Rome. Isn’t it wonderful too, the way in which it shows you, not the Pope—but the Papacy—not the man but the Church?’
    Miss Foster said nothing. Her puzzled eyes travelled from the drawing to Mrs. Burgoyne’s face. Then she caught sight of another photograph on the table.
    ‘And that also?’—she said—For again it was the face of Leo XIII .—feminine, priestly, indomitable—that looked out upon her from among the books.
    ‘Oh, my dear, come away,’ said Miss Manisty impatiently. ‘In my days the Scarlet Lady
was
the Scarlet Lady, and we didn’t flirt with her as all the world does now. Shrewd old gentleman! I should have thought one picture of him was enough.’
* * * * *
    As they entered the old painted salon, Mrs. Burgoyne went to one of the tall windows opening to the floor and set it wide. Instantly the Campagna was in the room—the great moonlit plain, a thousand feet below, with the sea at its further edge, and the boundless sweep of starry sky above it. From the little balcony, one might, it seemed, have walked straight into Orion. The note of a nightingale bubbled up from the olives; and the scent