not seem as long. There was nothing to do; nothing amused him, and
nobody asked anything of him. It would be very strange and pleasant to
be of use in the world.

He went home and sat down by the open window that looked across the
Tiber. The wide room was flooded with the evening light, and warm with
much colour that lingered and floated about beautiful objects here and
there. It was not a very luxuriously furnished room, but it was not the
habitation of an ascetic or puritanical man either. Guido cared more for
rare engravings and etchings than for pictures, and a few very fine
framed prints stood on the big writing table; there was Duerer's
Melancholia, and the Saint Jerome, and the Little White Horse, and the
small Saint Anthony, and Rembrandt's Three Trees, all by itself, as the
most wonderful etching in the world deserved to be; and here and there,
about the room, were a few good engravings by Martin Schoengauer, and by
Mantegna, and by Marcantonio Raimondi. The bold, careless, effective
drawing of the Italian engravers contrasted strongly with the profoundly
conscientious work of Schoengauer and Lucas van Leyden, and revealed at a
glance the incomparable mastery of Duerer's dry point and Rembrandt's
etching needle, the deep conviction of the German, and the inexhaustible
richness of the Dutchman's imagination.

A picture hung over the fireplace, the picture of a woman, at half
length and a little smaller than life, holding in exquisite hands a
small covered vessel of silver encrusted with gold, and gazing out into
the warm light with the gentlest hazel eyes. A veil of olive green
covered her head, but the fair hair found its way out, tresses and
ringlets, on each side of the face. The woman was perhaps a Magdalen,
not like any other Magdalen in all the paintings of the world, and more
the great lady of the castle of Magdalon, she of the Golden Legend. When
Andrea del Sarto painted that face, he meant something that he never
told, and it pleased Guido d'Este to try and guess the secret. As he
glanced at the canvas, glowing in the rich light, it struck him that
perhaps Cecilia Palladio was more like the woman in the picture than she
was like the Psyche. Then he almost laughed, and turned away, for he
realised that he was thinking of the girl continually, and saw her face
everywhere.

He turned away impatiently, in spite of the smile. He was annoyed by the
attraction he felt towards Cecilia, because the thought of