atherstonepaughs were all at work in the immense studio.
Silentia alone was idle, and, somewhat indecorously draped only in a bit
of old tapestry, with dishevelled hair and lolling head, leaned against
the wall, apparently in the last stages of inebriety. There against the
blue sky, all the world would have seemed petrified into the complete
passiveness of sitting for its picture.

[Illustration: YOUNG CAIN INTERVIEWING SILENTIA.]

Marietta was their model. She was posed in a nun's dress, pensive gray,
with virginal white bound primly across her brow. Marietta is a capital
model, and her sad face and tender eyes were upturned with exactly the
desired expression to the grinning mask in the centre of the ceiling.
Silentia kindly consented to pose for the cross to which the nun clung;
that is, she wobbled weakly into the place where the sacred emblem would
have been were this Nature and not Art, and where the cross would be in
the picture when completed. Marietta clung devoutly to Silentia's
ankles, and Silentia looked as cross as possible.

"How unusual to see one of Italia's children with a face like that!"
said a Leatherstonepaugh as she studied the nun's features. "One would
say that she had really found peace only after some terrible suffering."

"She does not give me that impression," said another Leatherstonepaugh.
"Her contours are too round, her color too undimmed, ever to have
weathered spiritual storms. She seems to me more like one of Giovanni
Bellini's Madonnas, those fair, fresh girl-mothers whom sorrow has never
breathed upon to blight a line or tint, and yet who seem to have a
prophecy written upon their faces--not of the glory of the agony, but of
the lifelong sadness of a strange destiny. This girl has some mournful
prescience perhaps. Let me talk with her by and by."

"Marietta," said a Leatherstonepaugh in the next repose, "if you were
not obliged to be a model, what would you choose to be, of all things in
the world?"

This was only an entering-wedge, intended by insidious degrees to pry
open the heart of the girl and learn the mystery of her Madonna-like
sadness.

Marietta looked up quickly: "What would I be, signorina? Dio mio! but I
would wear shining clothes and ride in the Polytheama! Giacomo says I
was born for the circus. Will le signorine see?"

In the twinkling of an eye, before the Leatherstonepaughs could breathe,
the pensive gray raiment was drawn up to the length of a ballet-skirt