One warm, dusty afternoon, when he turned into the Academy out of Fourth Avenue, the empty hall echoed to no footfall but his own. A group of weary women, who wore that look of wanting lunch which characterizes all picture-gallery-goers at home and abroad, stood faint before a certain large Venetian subject which Ferris abhorred, and the very name of which he spat out of his mouth with loathing for its unreality. He passed them with a sombre glance, as he took his way toward the retired spot where his own painting hung. A lady whose crapes would have betrayed to her own sex the latest touch of Paris stood a little way back from it, and gazed fixedly at it. The pose of her head, her whole attitude, expressed a quiet dejection; without seeing her face one could know its air of pensive wistfulness. Ferris resolved to indulge himself in a near approach to this unwonted spectacle of interest in his picture; at the sound of his steps the lady slowly turned a face of somewhat heavily molded beauty, and from low-growing, thick pale hair and level brows, stared at him with the sad eyes of Florida Vervain. She looked fully the last two years older. As though she were listening to the sound of his steps in the dark instead of having him there visibly before her, she kept her eyes upon him with a dreamy unrecognition. “Yes, it is I,” said Ferris, as if she had spoken. She recovered herself, and with a subdued, sorrowful quiet in her old directness, she answered, “I supposed you must be in New York,” and she indicated that she had supposed so from seeing this picture. Ferris felt the blood mounting to his head. “Do you think it is like?” he asked. “No,” she said, “it isn’t just to him; it attributes things that didn’t belong to him, and it leaves out a great deal.” “I could scarcely have hoped to please you in a portrait of Don Ippolito.” Ferris saw the red light break out as it used on the girl’s pale cheeks, and her eyes dilate angrily. He went on recklessly: “He sent for me after you went away, and gave me a message for you. I never promised to deliver it, but I will do so now. He asked me to tell you when we met, that he had acted on your desire, and had tried to reconcile himself to his calling and his religion; he was going to enter a Carmelite convent.” Florida made no answer, but she seemed to expect him to go on, and he was constrained to do so. “He never carried out his purpose,” Ferris said, with a keen glance at her; “he died the night after I saw him.” “Died?” The fan and the parasol and the two or three light packages she had been holding slid down one by one, and lay at her feet. “Thank you for bringing me his last words,” she said, but did not ask him anything more.