r. But she was restless and inattentive, and by and by
leaving the artist talking to her young daughter she began going round
by herself, moving constantly from picture to picture. Presently she
made an exclamation, and turning they saw her standing before a picture,
a portrait of a girl, staring fixedly at it. "Oh," she cried, and it was
a cry of pain, "was I once as beautiful as that?" and burst into tears.
She had found the picture she had been looking for, which she had come
to see; it had been there twenty to twenty-five years, and the story of
it was as follows.

When she was a young girl her mother took her to the great artist to
have her portrait painted, and when the work was at length finished she
and her mother went to see it. The artist put it before them and the
mother looked at it, her face expressing displeasure, and said not one
word. Nor did the artist open his lips. And at last the girl, to break
the uncomfortable silence, said, "Where shall we hang it, mother?" and
the lady replied, "Just where you like, my dear, so long as you hang it
with the face to the wall." It was an insolent, a cruel thing to say,
but the artist did not answer her bitterly; he said gently that she need
not take the portrait as it failed to please her, and that in any case
he would decline to take the money she had agreed to pay him for the
work. She thanked him coldly and went her way, and he never saw her
again. And now Time, the humbler of proud beautiful women, had given
him his revenge: the portrait, scorned and rejected when the colour and
sparkle of life was in the face, had been looked on once more by its
subject and had caused her to weep at the change in herself.

To return. One wishes in these moments of meeting, of surprise and
sudden revealings, that it were permissible to speak from the heart,
since then the very truth might have more balm than bitterness in
it. "Grieve not, dear friend of old days, that I have not escaped the
illusion common to all--the idea that those we have not looked on this
long time--full five years, let us say--have remained as they were while
we ourselves have been moving onwards and downwards in that path in
which our feet are set. No one, however hardened he may be, can escape
a shock of surprise and pain; but now the illusion I cherished has
gone--now I have seen with my physical eyes, and a new image, with
Time's writing on it, has taken the place of the old and brighter one,
I would