friend reproachfully, "you grieve me, and you
know it, by pretending to speak contemptuously of the most beautiful and
the divinest figure that mortal painter ever drew."

"Forgive me, Hilda!" said Miriam. "You take these matters more
religiously than I can, for my life. Guido's Archangel is a fine
picture, of course, but it never impressed me as it does _you_."

"Well; we will not talk of that," answered Hilda. "What I wanted you to
notice, in this sketch, is the face of the demon. It is entirely unlike
the demon of the finished picture. Guido, you know, always affirmed that
the resemblance to Cardinal Pamfili was either casual or imaginary. Now,
here is the face as he first conceived it."

"And a more energetic demon, altogether, than that of the finished
picture," said Kenyon, taking the sketch into his hand. "What a spirit
is conveyed into the ugliness of this strong, writhing, squirming
dragon, under the Archangel's foot! Neither is the face an impossible
one. Upon my word, I have seen it somewhere, and on the shoulders of a
living man!"

"And so have I," said Hilda. "It was what struck me from the first."

"Donatello, look at this face!" cried Kenyon.

The young Italian, as may be supposed, took little interest in matters
of art, and seldom or never ventured an opinion respecting them. After
holding the sketch a single instant in his hand, he flung it from him
with a shudder of disgust and repugnance, and a frown that had all the
bitterness of hatred.

"I know the face well!" whispered he. "It is Miriam's model!"

It was acknowledged both by Kenyon and Hilda that they had detected, or
fancied, the resemblance which Donatello so strongly affirmed; and it
added not a little to the grotesque and weird character which, half
playfully, half seriously, they assigned to Miriam's attendant, to think
of him as personating the demon's part in a picture of more than two
centuries ago. Had Guido, in his effort to imagine the utmost of sin
and misery, which his pencil could represent, hit ideally upon just this
face? Or was it an actual portrait of somebody, that haunted the old
master, as Miriam was haunted now? Did the ominous shadow follow him
through all the sunshine of his earlier career, and into the gloom that
gathered about its close? And when Guido died, did the spectre betake
himself to those ancient sepulchres, there awaiting a new victim, till
it was Miriam's ill-hap to encounter him?

"I do not acknowle