of light,” the immortal scene lives upon the quiet wall.  Year after year the slender, thought-worn Christ raises His hands of blessing; the disciples strain towards Him; the angels issue from the darkness; the friendly domestic life, happy, natural, unconscious, frames the divine mystery.  And among those who come to look there are, from time to time, men and women who draw from it that restlessness of vague emotion which Kitty felt as she hung now, gazing, on Ashe’s arm.

For there is in it an appeal which torments them—­like the winding of a mystic horn, on purple heights, by some approaching and unseen messenger.  Ineffable beauty, offering itself—­and in the human soul, the eternal human discord:  what else makes the poignancy of art—­the passion of poetry?

* * * * *

“That’s enough!” said Kitty, at last, turning abruptly away.

“You like it?” said Ashe, softly, detaining her, while he pressed the little hand upon his arm.  His heart was filled with a great pity for his wife in these days.

“Oh, I don’t know!” was Kitty’s impatient reply.

“It haunts me.  There’s still another to see—­in a chapel.  The sacristan’s making signs to us.”

“Is there?” Ashe stifled a yawn.  He asked Margaret French, who had come up with them, whether Kitty had not had quite enough sight-seeing.  He himself must go to the Piazza, and get the news before dinner.  As an English cabinet minister, he had been admitted to the best club of the Venice residents.  Telegrams were to be seen there; and there was anxious news from the Balkans.

Kitty merely insisted that she could not and would not go without her remaining Tintoret, and the others yielded to her at once, with that indulgent tenderness one shows to the wilfulness of a sick child.  She and Margaret followed the sacristan.  Ashe lingered behind in a passage of the church, surreptitiously reading an Italian newspaper.  He had the ordinary cultivated pleasure in pictures; but this ardor which Kitty was throwing into her pursuit of Tintoret—­the Wagner of painting—­left him cold.  He did not attempt to keep up with her.

Two ladies were already in the cloister chapel, with a gentleman.  As Kitty and her friend entered, these persons had just finished their inspection of the damaged but most beautiful “Pieta” which hangs over the altar, and their faces were towards the entrance.

“Maman!” cried Kitty, in amazement.

The lady addressed started, put up a gold-rimmed eye-glass, exclaimed, and hurried forward.

Kitty and she embraced, amid a torrent of laughter and interjections from the elder lady, and then Kitty, whose pale cheeks had put on scarlet, turned to Margaret French.

“Margaret!—­my mother, Madame d’Estrees.”