r
perfidious lover with a bodkin?"

"She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist. "Can you look at the
innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question? No; but, as I
read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood,
spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats
into her life."

"Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed the picture dealer,
"why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few
baiocchi to her washerwoman? No, no, my dear Panini. The picture being
now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She
has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next
morning. So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very
natural representation of a not uncommon fact."

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its
eye. It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.

But Hilda sought nothing either from the world's delicacy or its pity,
and never dreamed of its misinterpretations. Her doves often flew in
through the windows of the tower, winged messengers, bringing her what
sympathy they could, and uttering soft, tender, and complaining sounds,
deep in their bosoms, which soothed the girl more than a distincter
utterance might. And sometimes Hilda moaned quietly among the doves,
teaching her voice to accord with theirs, and thus finding a temporary
relief from the burden of her incommunicable sorrow, as if a little
portion of it, at least, had been told to these innocent friends, and
been understood and pitied.

When she trimmed the lamp before the Virgin's shrine, Hilda gazed at
the sacred image, and, rude as was the workmanship, beheld, or fancied,
expressed with the quaint, powerful simplicity which sculptors sometimes
had five hundred years ago, a woman's tenderness responding to her
gaze. If she knelt, if she prayed, if her oppressed heart besought the
sympathy of divine womanhood afar in bliss, but not remote, because
forever humanized by the memory of mortal griefs, was Hilda to be
blamed? It was not a Catholic kneeling at an idolatrous shrine, but a
child lifting its tear-stained face to seek comfort from a mother.

CHAPTER XXXVII

THE EMPTINESS OF PICTURE GALLERIES

Hilda descended, day by day, from her dove-cote, and went to one or
another of the great old palaces,--the Pamfili Doria, the Corsini, the
Sciarra, the Borghese, the Colonna,--where the d