They had now commenced their tour, he leading her to those masterpieces which he thought would please her. How well acquainted he was with all the galleries of his dear Louvre! There was not one of these pictures that did not recall the memory of some dream of his youth--a youth entirely spent in adorning with beautiful images the shrine we all carry within us before our twentieth year, but from which our passions soon expel all but the image of Venus! These pale and noble frescoes of Luini that hang in the narrow room to the right of the Salon Carré--how often had he not come to gaze upon their pious scenes when he wished to lend his poetry the soft charm, the broad and tender touch, of the old Lombard master! He had feasted his eyes for whole hours upon the mighty Crucifixion by Mantegna--a fragment of the magnificent painting in the church of San Zeno at Verona--as well as upon that most glorious of Raphaels, Saint George--an ideal hero dealing the dragon a furious stroke of his sword whilst spurring his white charger in pink trappings across the fresh greensward, symbolic of youth and hope. But it was more especially the portraits which had been the objects of his most fervent pilgrimages--from those of Holbein, Philippe de Champaigne, and Titian, to that of the elegant and mysterious lady simply attributed in the catalogue to the Venetian school, and bearing a cipher in her hair. He loved to think, in company with a clever critic, that this cipher meant Barbarelli and Cecilia--the name of the Giorgione and that of the mistress for whom tradition says that this great master died. During a visit he had once paid to the Louvre with Rosalie he had told her the romantic and tragic story on this very spot and before this very portrait. He now found himself repeating it to Suzanne, and in almost the same words. 'The painter loved her, and she betrayed him for one of his friends. At Vienna there is a picture painted by himself in which you see his sweet, sad eyes resting upon his treacherous friend, who approaches him with a gleaming dagger concealed behind his back.' Yes--the same words! When Rosalie heard the story she had turned her eyes upon him, and he had distinctly read the thoughts that filled her. 'How can any woman betray the man who loves her?' With her the question, had remained a dumb one, but Suzanne, after having stared curiously at the mysterious woman with the thin lips, gave expression to her thoughts with a sigh and a shake of her fair head. 'And yet she looks so good. It is terrible to think that a woman with a face like that could lie!'