etain, film over
film, each reflection of her least movement, the turning of her head,
the ungloving of her hand. Strange! that, with all this intoxicating
presence, she yet led a life so free from self, so simple, so absorbed,
that all trace of consciousness was excluded, and she seemed
unsophisticated as her own child.

As we were once thus employed in the studio, I asked Kenmure, abruptly,
if he never shrank from the publicity he was thus giving Laura. "Madame
Recamier was not quite pleased," I said, "that Canova had modelled her
bust, even from imagination. Do you never shrink from permitting
irreverent eyes to look on Laura's beauty? Think of men as you know
them. Would you give each of them her miniature, perhaps to go with them
into scenes of riot and shame?"

"Would to Heaven I could!" said he, passionately. "What else could save
them, if that did not? God lets his sun shine on the evil and on the
good, but the evil need it most."

There was a pause; and then I ventured to ask him a question that had
been many times upon my lips unspoken.

"Does it never occur to you," I said, "that Laura cannot live on earth
forever?"

"You cannot disturb me about that," he answered, not sadly, but with a
set, stern look, as if fencing for the hundredth time against an
antagonist who was foredoomed to be his master in the end. "Laura will
outlive me; she must outlive me. I am so sure of it, that, every time I
come near her, I pray that I may not be paralyzed, and die outside her
arms. Yet, in any event, what can I do but what I am doing,--devote my
whole soul to the perpetuation of her beauty, through art? It is my only
dream. What else is worth doing? It is for this I have tried, through
sculpture, through painting, through verse, to depict her as she is.
Thus far I have failed. Why have I failed? Is it because I have not
lived a life sufficiently absorbed in her? or is it that there is no
permitted way by which, after God has reclaimed her, the tradition of
her perfect loveliness may be retained on earth?"

The blinds of the piazza doorway opened, the sweet sea-air came in, the
low and level rays of yellow sunset entered as softly as if the breeze
were their chariot; and softer and stiller and sweeter than light or
air, little Marian stood on the threshold. She had been in the fields
with Janet, who had woven for her breeze-blown hair a wreath of the wild
gerardia blossoms, whose purple beauty had reminded the good Sco