delightful--perfectly delightful!'

Her voice, her manner charmed the girl's annoyance.

'If you like it'--she said, hesitating--'But it will come down!'

'I like it terribly--and it will not think of coming down! Let me show you
Mr. Manisty's latest purchase.'

And, slipping her arm inside Miss Foster's, Mrs. Burgoyne dexterously
turned her away from the glass, and brought her to the large central table,
where a vivid charcoal sketch, supported on a small easel, rose among the
litter of books.

It represented an old old man carried in a chair on the shoulders of a
crowd of attendants and guards. Soldiers in curved helmets, courtiers
in short velvet cloaks and ruffs, priests in floating vestments pressed
about him--a dim vast multitude stretched into the distance. The old man
wore a high cap with three lines about it; his thin and shrunken form was
enveloped in a gorgeous robe. The face, infinitely old, was concentrated
in the sharply smiling eyes, the long, straight, secret mouth. His arm,
supporting with difficulty the weight of the robe, was raised,--the hand
blessed. On either side of him rose great fans of white ostrich feathers,
and the old man among them was whiter than they, spectrally white from head
to foot, save for the triple cap, and the devices on his robe. But into
his emaciation, his weakness, the artist had thrown a triumph, a force
that thrilled the spectator. The small figure, hovering above the crowd,
seemed in truth to have nothing to do with it, to be alone with the huge
spaces--arch on arch--dome on dome--of the vast church through which it was
being borne.--