e De Rosa, laughing. 'I adore it! But
as my singing days are over it does not matter at all. Oh, how good it
is!'

She sipped it again and again, with all sorts of little cries and sighs
of satisfaction.

Logotheti and Margaret looked on, smiling at her childish delight.

'Do you think I might have a little more?' she asked, presently. 'Only
half a glass!'

Logotheti filled the glass again, though she laughingly protested that
half a glass was all she wanted. But he took none himself.

Margaret saw a picture at the other end of the room which attracted her
attention, and she rose to go and look at it. Logotheti followed her,
but Madame De Rosa, who had established her small person in the most
comfortable arm-chair in the room, was too much interested in the
maraschino to move. Margaret stood in silence before the painting for a
few moments, and Logotheti waited for her to speak, watching her as he
always did when she was not looking.

'What is it?' she asked, at last. 'It's quite beautiful, but I don't
understand it.'

'Nor do I, in the least,' answered Logotheti. 'I found it in Italy two
years ago. It's what they call an encaustic painting, like the Muse of
Cortona, probably of the time of Tiberius. It is painted on a slab of
slate three inches thick, and burnt in by a process that is lost. You
might put it into the fire and leave it there without doing it any
harm. That much I know, for I found it built into a baker's oven. But I
can tell you no more about it. I have some pretty good things here, but
this is quite my best picture. It is very like somebody,
too--uncommonly like! Do you see the resemblance?'

'No. I suppose I don't know the person.'

Logotheti laughed and took up a little mirror set in an old Spanish
frame.

'Look at yourself,' he said. 'The picture is the image of you.'

'Of me?' Margaret took the glass, and her cheek flushed a little as she
looked at herself and then at the picture, and realised that the
likeness was not imaginary.

'In future,' said Logotheti, 'I shall tell people that it is a portrait
of you.'

'Of me? Oh please, no!' cried Margaret anxiously, and blushing deeper.
'Don't!'

Logotheti laughed.

'Did you think I was in earnest?' he asked.

The painting represented the head and shoulders of a woman--perhaps of
a goddess, though it had that strangely living look about the eyes and
mouth which belongs to all good portraits that are like the originals.
The woman's h