e to execute it himself.
The portrait of our ancestor who ordered the statue is in the gallery."

Before Nina could resist, she found herself being conducted between
mother and son through the numerous rooms which terminated finally in
the gallery. Unlike most of the collections of Italy, this included many
modern canvases.

Before the portrait of a thin, heavy-boned, frightened-looking English
girl, the duke assumed a deeply sentimental air, sighing as though out
of breath. "That is the portrait of my beloved Jane," he said. "It was
painted by Sargent while we were on our honeymoon." The artist, with his
consummate skill of characterization, had transferred a crushed,
fatalistic helplessness to the canvas. Nina found herself, partly in
pity, partly in contempt, scrutinizing the face of the woman who had
brought herself to marry such a man.

Suddenly an indescribable feeling of oppression seized her. She looked
away from the picture, and then, glancing around to speak to the
duchess, she saw the edge of her dress disappearing through the hangings
of the doorway, while between herself and her retreating hostess stood
the stolid figure of the duke, with the most odious smile imaginable
upon his horrid face.

With a flush of anger that made her temples throb, Nina realized that a
dastardly trap had been sprung upon her. To leave a young girl even for
a moment unchaperoned was against the strictest rule of Italian
propriety. The duchess had brought her all this distance on purpose to
leave her with the villainous duke--in a situation that, should it
become known, would so compromise an Italian girl that there would be no
place for her in the social system of her world afterward outside of a
convent. Her marriage with the duke would be almost inevitable.

Determined to give no evidence of the terror that gripped her, with the
most fearless air she could assume she attempted to pass the duke; but
he blocked her way so that her manoeuvres came down to the indignity of
a game of blind man's buff. Nina held her head very high and looked
straight at her tormentor. "Please allow me to pass." She tried hard to
speak quietly and to keep the tremulousness out of her voice.

For answer Scorpa quickly closed the intervening distance between them,
and the next thing she knew the grasp of his thick, hot hands burned
through the sleeve of her coat, and his face was thrust near to her
own. In a frenzy of fury she wrenched herself fre