Miss Crawford tripped into the painting-room immediately after her arrival at the Fountains, and elevated herself on tiptoe in order to embrace her father. "You dear old darling, how you do smell of varnish!" she cried, after bestowing a kiss upon each of his cheeks. "Are you using copal for your new picture?--dreadfully stiff stuff to work with, isn't it? And what is the new picture? You didn't tell me that in any of your letters, and I've been dying to know. I suppose I may look?" Before the painter could reply, his daughter had planted herself before the easel, and was contemplating his unfinished work. "As long as it's nothing about Marie Antoinette, Mary Queen of Scots, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, or the Vicar of Wakefield, I'm satisfied," she said. She stood looking at the picture for some minutes, and then shrugged her shoulders impatiently as she turned to the painter: "I must give it up, papa," she exclaimed. "It's rather nice; but you must have half a page of description in the catalogue if you want people to know what it all means." It was the picture of a page holding a horse in a woody landscape. The page wore the costume of Charles the Second's court; but the loose tumbled hair falling about the fair neck, the small jewelled hand that grasped the bridle, the delicate curves of the figure, the disorder of a dress that seemed to have been arranged by unaccustomed hands, and the shrinking terror of the pose, betrayed the sex of the pretended page. The attitude of the horse expressed as intense a terror as that which agitated the woman. The bright chestnut of his sides was darkened with sweat, the distended nostrils were flecked with foam, the eyes were dilated. The woman's face was exquisitely beautiful; but its loveliness was of the diabolical rather than the angelic order. The eyes of the disguised beauty were turned with a look of unspeakable horror towards a woodland glade, which stretched away in the background, and her disengaged hand was pressed convulsively upon her breast, as if to control the beating of her heart. On the grass, near the horse's feet, there lay an embroidered glove, and a cavalier's cloak, whose rich purple velvet and gold embroidery made a mass of colour in the foreground. "Who is she, papa?" asked Flo. "Her dress is unutterably jolly, and her hair looks as if you had painted it with a patent tube of liquid sunshine. What a wonderful old thing you are! But allow me to inquire for the second time what it all means. A pretty woman doesn't dress herself in a ruby-velvet doublet, and hold a horse in a wood without a motive." "The woman is the Countess of Shrewsbury, who disguised herself as a page, and held the Duke of Buckingham's horse while he fought a duel with her husband. It's not a very moral story, and I doubt if I shall exhibit it."