For mark you this: that all she had known I too knew, in my degree, so soon as ever I was completed. Else had I been a bad portrait. It all came to my memory at once. I remembered my happy girlhood, the strange indifference of my utter innocence when I was first told I was destined to marry the great Duke, whose vassal my father was, and how my marriage would somehow--I am, maybe, less clear about details than my original would have been--release my father from some debt or obligation to the Raimondi which otherwise would have involved the forfeiture of our old home. So ignorant was I that I rejoiced to think that I should be the means of preserving for my family the long stretches of vine-clad hills and the old Castello in the Apennines that had borne our name since the first stone was laid, centuries ago. So ignorant, innocent, indifferent--call it what you will!--that the moment I was told my destiny I went straight to Giacinto, the page, with whom I had grown from infancy, to tell him the good news, that he might rejoice too. But he would not rejoice at my bidding, and he was moody and reserved, and I wondered. I was but twelve and he thirteen. Although a girl may be older than a boy, even at those years, her eyes are not so wide open to see some things, and it may be he saw plainer than I. I know not. This, then, was what had happened to the beautiful creature that came round into my sight on that day when I first saw and heard and knew her for myself, and hoped I was well done, and very like. And thus, also, it all came back to me, so soon as I was finished and was really Maddalena Raimondi, how the great Venetian artist, Angelo Allori, whom they called _Il Bronzino_, came to the Castello to paint my mother, and how he took a fancy to Giacinto, and would have him away to his studio, and taught him how to use brushes and colours, and how to grind and prepare these last, and to make canvas ready for the painter. And it ended by his taking him as an apprentice, at his own wish and Giacinto's. And they went away together to Venice, and I could recall now that Maddalena had not seen Giacinto after that for six years. That is to say: she had not seen him till he came to the Villa Raimondi in the first year of her unhappy marriage, an unhappy bride with all the deadly revelation of the realities of life that an accursed wedlock must needs bring. The girl was no longer a girl; she knew what she had lost. And I knew it too, and all that she had known up to the moment of that last brush-touch, when Giacinto said, "Now, _carissima Signora_, you may come round and see!" And the ringing laugh came round, and _she_ came round, that had been me. Then I too saw what I had been--what I was still. And after that, I will tell you what I saw and heard--but presently!