he torments of Dante's Inferno. When the doorbell rang, and while
Cain cried "_Chi e?_" at the peephole, Leah, who was just posing for
Rachel's barelegged gypsy, hastily pulled a long silk skirt from haughty
but unresisting Silentia and hurried it over her own head before Lady
Diavoletta was admitted. The heiress of the Beelzebubs tarried but a
moment, then took her departure grimly, without hinting a word of her
purpose. Said Lady Diavoletta afterward to the Cherubim sisters, "Would
you believe it? I called one day upon those Leatherstonepaughs, and they
never even apologized for receiving me in a room where there was an
insane American just escaped from her keeper, _tray beang arrangee pore
doncy le cong cong_!"

[Illustration: SILENTIA AS SHE APPEARED TO LADY DIAVOLETTA BEELZEBUB.]

Dismal and grim though the exterior of that palazzo was, needing but
towers and machicolated parapets to seem a fortress, or an encircling
wall to seem a frowning monastery where cowled figures met each other
only to whisper sepulchrally, "Brother, we must die," it was yet the
scene of not a few laughable experiences. And perhaps even in this
respect it may not have differed so widely as one might think from
cloistered shades of other days, when out of sad, earth-colored raiment
and the habit of dismal speech human sentiment painted pictures while
yet the fagots grew apace for their destruction as well as for the
funeral-pyre of their scolding and bellowing enemy, Savonarola. For
where Fra Angelico, working from the life, could create a San Sebastian
so instinct with earthly vitality and earthly bloom that pious
Florentine women could not say their prayers in peace in its presence,
there were three easels, each bearing a canvas, in different parts of
the room. Before each easel worked a Leatherstonepaugh, each clad with
classic simplicity in a long blue cotton garment, decorated with many
colors and smelling strongly of retouching varnish, that covered her
from the white ruffle at her throat to the upper edge of her black
alpaca flounce.

The room was silent, and, except for the deft action of brushes,
motionless. Only that from below was heard the musical splash of the
Barberini Tritons, and that from the windows could be seen the sombre
pines of the Ludovisi gardens swaying in solemn rhythmic measure must
have been sometimes unbending from the dole and drear of mediaeval
asceticism into something very like human fun.

One day the Le