“You are not alone?” he said, taking a place by her as she resumed her seat.

“Yes, I have come alone.”  And, after a pause, she added, “We don’t think it necessary always to keep together.  That would become burdensome.  I often leave them, and go to places by myself.”

Her look was still turned upwards.  Mallard followed its direction.

“Which of the Sibyls is your favourite?” he asked.

At once she indicated the Delphic, but without speaking.

“Mine too.”

Both fixed their eyes upon the figure, and were silent.

“You have been here very often?” were Mallard’s next words.

“Last year very often.”

“From genuine love of it, or a sense of duty?” he asked, examining her face.

She considered before replying.

“Not only from a sense of duty, though of course I have felt that.  I don’t love anything of Michael Angelo’s, but I am compelled to look and study.  I came here this morning only to refresh my memory of one of those faces”—­she pointed to the lower part of the Last Judgment—­“and yet the face is dreadful to me.”

She found that he was smiling, and abruptly she added the question: 

“Do you love that picture?”

“Why, no; but I often delight in it.  I wouldn’t have it always before me (for that matter, no more would I have the things that I love).  A great work of art may be painful at all times, and sometimes unendurable.”

“I have learnt to understand that,” she said, with something of humility, which came upon Mallard as new and agreeable.  “But—­it is not long since that scene represented a reality to me.  I think I shall never see it as you do.”

Mallard wished to look at her, but did not.

“I have sometimes been repelled by a feeling of the same kind,” he answered.  “Not that I myself ever thought of it as a reality, but I have felt angry and miserable in remembering that a great part of the world does.  You see the pretty girl there, with her father.  I noticed her awed face as I passed, and heard a word or two of the man’s, which told me that from them there was no question of art.  Poor child!  I should have liked to pat her hand, and tell her to be good and have no fear.”

“Did Michael Angelo believe it?” Miriam asked diffidently, when she had glanced with anxious eyes at the pair of whom he spoke.

“I suppose so.  And yet I am far from sure.  What about Dante?  Haven’t you sometimes stumbled over his grave assurances that this and that did really befall him?  Putting aside the feeble notion that he was a deluded visionary, how does one reconcile the artist’s management of his poem with the Christian’s stem faith?  In any case, he was more poet than Christian when he wrote.  Milton makes no such claims; he merely prays for the enlightenment of his imagination.”

Miriam turned from the great fresco, and again gazed at the Sibyls and Prophets.