re drawing my portrait I shall
draw yours."

"Bravo!" she cried, and wanted to go home at once, so that they might
begin.

As was his custom, Wilhelm had all that was needful in his big trunk,
and could supply Pilar with materials. The next afternoon they set to
work. They established themselves in the middle of a great meadow,
committing thereby an extreme act of trespass, and making their way to
it over a ditch, a low wall, and through a blackberry hedge. Here no
prying eye would annoy them, their sole and most discreet spectator
being Fido, and he was generally asleep.

Pilar had a drawing-block and used a pencil, Wilhelm sketched his
picture on a page of a large album in colored chalks like a pastel. She
kept trying to peep at his work, but he would not allow it, and
insisted on their making a compact not to look at one another's work of
art till it was finished. Two sittings sufficed, however, and the
portraits could be exchanged. Pilar gave a cry of surprise when Wilhelm
handed her his picture.

"How strange that we should have had almost the same idea."

She was represented as a Sphinx, after the Greek rather than the
Egyptian conception. A voluptuous, soft, round, feline body, graceful,
cruel paws, a wonderful bosom as if hewn out of marble, and above it
all Pilar's regally poised head with its crown of shimmering gold hair,
shrewd eyes, and blood-red vampire lips. Between her forepaws she held
a little trembling mouse in which Wilhelm's features were cleverly
indicated, and she looked down upon her victim with a smile in which
there was something of a foretaste of the joy of tearing a quivering
creature to pieces and sucking its warm blood.

Pilar's drawing was a very good likeness of Wilhelm as Apollo in
Olympian nudity, handsome, slender and vapid, in its resemblance to
school copies of the antique. A charming little cat with Pilar's
features was rubbing herself against his leg. The pussy blinked up at
the young Greek god with an expression of adoration, half-comic,
half-touching, while he bent his head and gazed down at her
thoughtfully. Pilar took the sheet from Wilhelm's hand and compared it
with hers.

"They are exactly the same," she said at last, "only that they are
entirely the opposite of one another. Do you really feel that I am as
you have drawn me?"

"Yes," he answered in a low voice.

"How unjust you are to yourself and to me--I a Sphinx and you a
frightened mouse! To begin with, the