! It would not be much trouble, and I
should be so proud to see my beautiful mamma in the Academy-exhibition
next year."

Mrs. Rothesay shook her head.

"Nay--here he comes to ask you himself," cried Olive, as a tall, a very
tall shadow darkened the window, and its corporeality entered the room.

He was a most extraordinary-looking man,--Mr. Van-brugh. Olive had,
indeed, reason to call him "not handsome," for you probably would not
see an uglier man twice in a lifetime. Gigantic and ungainly in height,
and coarse in feature, he certainly was the very antipodes of his
own exquisite creations. And for that reason he created them. In his
troubled youth, tortured with the sense of that blessing which was
denied him, he had said, "Providence has created me hideous: I will
outdo Providence; I with my hand will continually create beauty." And
so he did--ay, and where he created, he loved. He took his art for his
mistress, and, like the Rhodian sculptor, he clasped it to his soul
night and day, until it grew warm and life-like, and became to him in
the stead of every human tie. Thus Michael Vanbrugh had lived, for
fifty years, a life solitary even to moroseness; emulating the great
Florentine master, whose Christian name it was his glory to bear.
He painted grand pictures, which nobody bought, but which he and his
faithful little sister Meliora thought the greater for that. The world
did not understand him, nor did he understand the world; so he shut
himself out from it altogether, until his small and rapidly-decreasing
income caused him to admit into his house as lodgers the widow and
daughter.

He might not have done so, had not Miss Meliora hinted how lovely
the former was, and how useful she might be as a model when they grew
sociable together.

He came to make his request now, and he made it with the greatest
unconcern. In his opinion everything in life tended toward one
great end--Art He looked on all beauty as only made to be painted.
Accordingly, he stepped up to his inmate, with the following succinct
address:

"Madam, I want a Grecian head. Yours just suits me; will you oblige
me by sitting?" And then adding, as a soothing and flattering
encouragement: "It is for my great work--my 'Alcestis!'--one of a series
of six pictures, which I hope to finish one day."

He tossed back his long iron-grey hair, and scanned intently the
gentle-looking lady whom he had hitherto noticed only with the usual
civilities of an