followed you with their smile no matter in what portion
of the room you chanced to be. On an opposite wall hung a Rembrandt
painting of an old woman, and further along the magical "Mona Lisa." In
all the history of art there is no more fascinating story than that
relating to this great picture by Leonardo da Vinci. For the woman who
was the original of the picture was a great Italian princess whom many
people adored because of her strange beauty. She had scores of lovers
of noble blood and lowly, but no one is supposed to have understood the
secret of her inscrutable smile, not even the artist who painted it.
This picture was first the property of Italy and then carried away to
hang for many years in the most celebrated room in the great gallery of
the Louvre in Paris. From there it was stolen by an Italian workman,
taken back into Italy and later restored to the French Government. But
before Mona Lisa's return to her niche in the Louvre she made a kind of
triumphal progress through the great cities of her former home, Rome,
Florence and Venice. And in each place men, women and little children
came flocking in thousands to pay their tribute to beauty. And so for
those of us who think of beauty as a passing, an ephemeral thing, there
is this lesson of its universal, its eternal quality. For the smile of
one woman, dead these hundreds of years, yet fixed by genius on a square
of canvas, can still stir the pulses of the world.

Betty happened to be standing under this picture as she helped Esther
remove her coat and hat. And though there was nothing mysterious in her
youthful, American prettiness, there is always a poignant and appealing
quality in all beauty. Esther suddenly leaned over and placing her hands
on both her sister's cheeks, kissed her.

"What have you been doing alone all day?" she asked. "Was your mother
well enough to go out with you?"

Betty shook her head without replying and, though Esther saw nothing,
Dick Ashton had an idea that his sister was merely waiting for a more
propitious time for the account of her own day. For she asked
immediately after: "What difference in the world does it make, Esther
Crippen, what I have been doing? The thing I wish to know this instant
is whether Professor Hecksher has asked you to sing at his big concert
with his really star singers? And if he has asked you what did you
answer?"

"So that was what was worrying you, Esther?" Dick said and walked over
to the high wi