He went and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of the ear to suggest materialism.  Further consideration ensued.  “Vigil’s off, I’m afraid,” said Harringay.  “Why not Mephistopheles?  But that’s a bit too common.  ’A Friend of the Doge,’—­not so seedy.  The armour won’t do, though.  Too Camelot.  How about a scarlet robe and call him ‘One 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,” he said, “making faces and all that—­sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?”