A girl of seventeen, with a knitted tam-o'-shanter cap and a thick cable of red-bronze hair hanging down her back, walked along a gallery of the Louvre, looking for her aunt. The eyes that turned whenever she heard a footfall or, passing a statue or case, saw a fresh vista before her, were of a light brown, with just such a hint of gold in their irises as you see when some opals are turned and catch a different light; and they were confused and overfilled with the treasures on which they had rested. She was an art-student, and must return to London on the morrow in order to resume her studies at the McGrath. It was her first visit to Paris, and she had spent the whole of her three weeks at the Cluny and the Luxembourg, at the Louvre and Versailles. Now, drenched and sated with beauty, she still could not bear to leave it all. A few minutes before, passing through the Salon Carré, where an elderly lady had been copying the Entombment, she had wished that she too might be old and white-haired if only age might so enlarge her capacity for loveliness, that even youth would be well lost for it. Already she loved the highest when she saw it, and, being an artist, she needs must attempt it too. The girl found her aunt near the spot where the Antinöus stands on its pedestal, and walked along by her side, neither speaking nor listening to the elder lady's remarks on the objects they passed. They did not seem to her to be worth listening to. She knew that for her aunt art had reached its _comble_ on the day when the late Sir Noël Paton had affixed his signature to "The Man with the Muckrake," and she had got out of the way of trying to explain that much water had flowed under London Bridge and many students flowed through the McGrath since that time. Besides, she did not want to talk. She wanted this last high hour in the Louvre as much as might be to herself. She wanted to taste the full emotion of it, not even analysing it, if only for once analysis would cry a truce. At the end of the gallery they turned and walked back again. It was as they passed the Antinöus for the second time that the girl felt her young bosom rise almost painfully. She could not have told why, without premeditation, she suddenly lingered, so that her aunt passed a little ahead. She watched her disappear behind some plinth or pedestal or other, and then stopped opposite the marble bust. There was no knowing when she might find herself in this wonderful place again, and it seemed to her that her farewell of it now required some symbol. She gave a furtive glance round. Neither visitor nor _gardien_ was to be seen, and again something seemed to rise in her throat. Noiselessly she stole to the pedestal. For a moment she wondered whether she dared; the next instant she had risen,--in her low-heeled brown shoes she was hardly more than five feet high,--she had risen on tiptoe. She crushed her lips against the Antinöus's marble cheek.