what her own heart had felt, and her own eyes had expressed, when she had painted that picture before her mirror, trusting in the complete disguise of the decided changes in features and coloring which she had made. She had painted the expression as faithfully as she could, knowing that no one who had never seen her completely off guard would recognize it. She felt now that if she should discover that there was a trace of possible identification in either features or expression, she could not endure it. Harold would think, and would have a right to think, that she had made capital out of her most sacred shame and sorrow; and he was the sort of man to whom that idea would be monstrous. She knew that she never could have painted it if she had had the least idea of exhibiting it; but when it was done, and she had shown it to Etienne to get his criticism on the technique, and he had been so plainly delighted with it, and urged her not to carry it any farther, but to exhibit it as it was, she had agreed to it for three reasons. One was to please her master, who was not very easily pleased; another was because she knew she could keep it secret by telling no one except the two people who already knew; and the third and decisive one was that it was a way suddenly opened to her of giving her message to the world impersonally. She felt a sort of exultation in the thought that in this way she could say: “Look in my face, and see. This is marriage!” When Sonia got out of her carriage she dismissed it with the maid, and mounted the steps with a look of greater firmness and resolution than she really felt, for physically she was ill and weak. She knew, however, that she might meet with acquaintances here, and might attract the attention of strangers by being quite alone, and therefore she realized the necessity of calmness in her outward manner. Her face was partly hid by a veil, and she had managed to avoid the gaze of one or two people whom she had recognized as she made her way quickly to the room in which she knew that her picture was hung. In spite of her preoccupation, it quickened her pulses a little to see that there was a small group of people in front of it, evidently talking about it. As she stood behind these, and looked full at the face on the canvas, which was looking full at her, a sudden sense of conscious power, the knowledge that she had created a thing of intrinsic character, came over her, and she could hardly realize that it was she who had done it.