of the Sacred College'? Humour in that, and an appreciation of
Middle Italian History."

"There's always Benvenuto Cellini," said Harringay; "with a clever
suggestion of a gold cup in one corner. But that would scarcely suit
the complexion."

He describes himself as babbling in this way in order to keep down an
unaccountably unpleasant sensation of fear. The thing was certainly
acquiring anything but a pleasing expression. Yet it was as certainly
becoming far more of a living thing than it had been--if a sinister
one--far more alive than anything he had ever painted before. "Call it
'Portrait of a Gentleman,'" said Harringay;--"A Certain Gentleman."

"Won't do," said Harringay, still keeping up his courage. "Kind of
thing they call Bad Taste. That sneer will have to come out. That
gone, and a little more fire in the eye--never noticed how warm his
eye was before--and he might do for--? What price Passionate Pilgrim?
But that devilish face won't do--_this_ side of the Channel.

"Some little inaccuracy does it," he said; "eyebrows probably too
oblique,"--therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light,
and resuming palette and brushes.

The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where
the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover.
Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows--it could scarcely be the
eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if
anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more
than ever a leer--and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye,
then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of
brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to
have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a
flash of passion, possibly with something of the courage of panic, he
struck the brush full of bright red athwart the picture; and then a
very curious thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred--if it _did_
occur.

_The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his
mouth, and wiped the colour off his face with his hand_.

Then the _red eye_ opened again, with a sound like the opening of
lips, and the face smiled. "That was rather hasty of you," said the
picture.

Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his
self-possession returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were
reasonable creatures.

"Why do you keep moving about then,