The strange sorrow that had befallen Hilda did not fail to impress its mysterious seal upon her face, and to make itself perceptible to sensitive observers in her manner and carriage.  A young Italian artist, who frequented the same galleries which Hilda haunted, grew deeply interested in her expression.  One day, while she stood before Leonardo da Vinci’s picture of Joanna of Aragon, but evidently without seeing it,—­for, though it had attracted her eyes, a fancied resemblance to Miriam had immediately drawn away her thoughts,—­this artist drew a hasty sketch which he afterwards elaborated into a finished portrait.  It represented Hilda as gazing with sad and earnest horror at a bloodspot which she seemed just then to have discovered on her white robe.  The picture attracted considerable notice.  Copies of an engraving from it may still be found in the print shops along the Corso.  By many connoisseurs, the idea of the face was supposed to have been suggested by the portrait of Beatrice Cenci; and, in fact, there was a look somewhat similar to poor Beatrice’s forlorn gaze out of the dreary isolation and remoteness, in which a terrible doom had involved a tender soul.  But the modern artist strenuously upheld the originality of his own picture, as well as the stainless purity its subject, and chose to call it—­and was laughed at for his pains—­“Innocence, dying of a Blood-stain!”

“Your picture, Signore Panini, does you credit,” remarked the picture dealer, who had bought it of the young man for fifteen scudi, and afterwards sold it for ten times the sum; “but it would be worth a better price if you had given it a more intelligible title.  Looking at the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable.  But what is this blood-stain?  And what has innocence to do with it?  Has she stabbed her perfidious lover with a bodkin?”

“She! she commit a crime!” cried the young artist.  “Can you look at the innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question?  No; but, as I read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood, spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats into her life.”

“Then, in the name of her patron saint,” exclaimed the picture dealer, “why don’t she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few baiocchi to her washerwoman?  No, no, my dear Panini.  The picture being now my property, I shall call it ‘The Signorina’s Vengeance.’  She has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next morning.  So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very natural representation of a not uncommon fact.”

Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its eye.  It is more a coarse world than an unkind one.