“I don’t really know, but it’s the only name I’ve heard given to it. I never saw any cast of it till yesterday, coming home from my trip West. I had an hour before my train left, so I ran in to take a look at the Museum. Say, those Middle-Westerners are alive, all right! Priceless, that Museum! And just as I was leaving, my eyes fell on this wonderful, wonderful thing. Seeing it was the big adventure of my whole trip. Its beauty has haunted me ever since.” “Take down my copy, if you like,” said Grant. “Oh, how exquisitely you’ve colored it, Stevedear! No one can beat you in such things. You’ve brought out every beauty, somehow. And it suggests both dawn and twilight.” Gerald passed his fingers with appreciative tenderness over the broad brow of the face called Forgiveness, and went on, with animation. “At the Museum, there was a nice old cabinet-maker, German type, fitting a frame for their cast. Recent addition, it seems. He looked intelligent, so I asked him what it was. He said he didn’t know exactly; it hadn’t been ‘catalocked’ yet. But a poet friend of his had said it ought to be called the Rose of Pardon. Then he told me, musingly, that it made him think of the Virgin at Nuremberg.” “That might well be,” observed Uncle Steve, pushing over the matches. “Well, then, next a little Italian girl came along, with her sketch-book. She saw my interest, and showed me the astonishingly good pencil sketch she had made from the cast. So I asked her what it was, where it was from. She said she didn’t know; she understood that it was called Forgiveness. Then she looked me all over to see what manner of man I was, and shyly said that to her it was very beautiful, like the Madonna at Perugia.” “I can see what she meant, of course.” “But that isn’t the half, dearie! Just then a French painter, evidently a Friday lecturer or something of the sort, came in with a class of young boys. Lord, how they burbled, all over the place! One of the kids asked him the question that was trembling on my lips, and he answered that he wasn’t sure, but that he believed the cast was called Forgiveness. It was rather touching to hear him repeat very reverently, in his pronounced ‘Parrhisian’ accent, ‘Forgive us our trespasses.’ The boys felt it, too, and they were very quiet for a moment. Then the Frenchman, with a bright glance at me (guessing no doubt that I too was an artist), added that for him, it was like the Virgin of the Visitation, so miraculously saved out of the destruction at Reims.” “It seems to me more beautiful than that, even,” interposed the elder man, “but I can understand his feeling.” “Exactly! And then, last of all, a real live American art student came hustling up, just the kind you see here at the League, only more so. He, too, said the face was called Forgiveness, adding briskly, ‘Perfect American type, don’t you think? Beats Gibson, what?’”