and capable of overthrowing many a stronger citadel than the tender heart of a sensitive girl like Innocent, who by a most curious mischance had been associated all her life with the romance of his medieval name and lineage. "Yes--of course she must come out here," Blythe decided, after a few minutes' cogitation. "I'll send a wire to Miss Leigh this morning and follow it up by a letter to the child herself, urging her to join me. The change and distraction will perhaps save her from too much association with Jocelyn,--I do not trust that man--never have trusted him! Poor little girl! She shall not have her spirit broken if I can help it." He stayed yet another few minutes at the open window, and taking out a cigar from his case began to light it. While doing this his eye was suddenly caught by the picturesque, well-knit figure of a man sitting easily on a step near the clustering boats gathered close to the hotel's special landing place. He was apparently one of the many road-side artists one meets everywhere about the Italian Lakes, ready to paint a sunset or moonlight on Como or Maggiore on commission at short notice for a few francs. He was not young--his white hair and grizzled moustache marked the unpleasing passage of resistless time,--yet there was something lissom and graceful about him that suggested a kind of youth in age. His attire consisted of much worn brown trousers and a loose white shirt kept in place by a red belt,--his shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbow, displaying thin brown muscular arms, expressive of energy, and he wore a battered brown hat which might once have been of the so-called "Homburg" shape, but which now resembled nothing ever seen in the way of ordinary head-gear. He was busily engaged in sketching a view of the lake and the opposite mountains, evidently to the order of some fashionably dressed women who stood near him watching the rapid and sure movements of his brush--he had his box of water-colours beside him, and smiled and talked as he worked. Lord Blythe watched him with lively interest, while enjoying the first whiffs of his lately lit cigar. "A clever chap, evidently!" he thought. "These Italians are all artists and poets at heart. When those women have finished with him I'll get him to do a sketch for me to send to Innocent--just to show her the loveliness of the place. She'll be delighted! and it may tempt her to come here." He waited a few minutes longer, till he saw the artist hand over the completed drawing to his lady patrons, one of whom paid him with a handful of silver coin. Something in the bearing and attitude of the man as he rose from the step where he had been seated and lifted his shapeless brown hat to his customers in courteous acknowledgment of their favours as they left him, struck Blythe with an odd sense of familiarity. "I must have seen him somewhere before," he thought. "In Venice, perhaps--or Florence--these fellows are like gipsies, they wander about everywhere."