d how long shall you stay, brother?"

"Stay?--Until my heart grows pulseless, and my brain dull. Why should I
ever come back to this cold England?

"No: let me grow old, die, and be buried under the shadow of the eternal
City."

"He will never come back again--never," said Miss Vanbrugh, looking at
Olive with a vague bewilderment. "He will leave this pretty cottage, and
me, and everything."

There was a dead silence, during which poor 'Meliora sat plaiting
her white apron in fold after fold, as was her habit when in deep and
perplexed thought. Then she went up to her brother.

"Michael, if you will take me, I should like to go too."

"What!" cried Mrs. Rothesay, "you, my dear Miss Vanbrugh, who are so
thoroughly English--who always said you hated moving from place to
place, and would live and die at Woodford Cottage!

"Hush--hush! we'll not talk about that, lest he should hear," said
Meliora glancing half frightened at her brother. But he stood absorbed
by the window, looking out apparently on the sky, though his eyes saw
nothing--nothing! "Michael, do you quite understand--may I go with you
to Rome?"

"Very well--very well, sister," he answered, in the tone of a man who is
indifferent to the subject, except that consent gives less trouble than
refusal. Then he turned towards Olive, and asked her to go with him to
his painting-room; he wanted to consult with her as to the sort of
frame that would suit the "Alcestis." Indeed, his pupil had now grown
associated with all his pursuits, and had penetrated further in the
depths of his inward life than any one else had been ever suffered to
do. Olive gradually became to him his cherished pupil--the child of his
soul, to whom he would fain transmit the mantle of his fame. He had but
one regret, sometimes earnestly, and comically expressed--that she was a
woman--only a woman.

They went and stood before the picture, he and Olive; Meliora stealing
after her brother's footsteps, noiseless but constant as his shadow. And
this ever-following, faithful love clung so closely to its object that,
shadow-like, what all others beheld, by him was never seen.

Michael Vanbrugh cast on his picture a look such as no living face ever
had won, or ever would win, from his cold eyes. It was the gaze of
a parent on his child, a lover on his mistress, an idolator on his
self-created god. Then he took his palette, and began to paint,
lingeringly and lovingly, on slight portions of backgr