"Some little inaccuracy does it," he said; "eyebrows probably too oblique,"--therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light, and resuming palette and brushes. The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover. Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows--it could scarcely be the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more than ever a leer--and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye, then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a flash of passion, possibly with something of the courage of panic, he struck the brush full of bright red athwart the picture; and then a very curious thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred--if it _did_ occur. _The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his mouth, and wiped the colour off his face with his hand_. Then the _red eye_ opened again, with a sound like the opening of lips, and the face smiled. "That was rather hasty of you," said the picture. Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his self-possession returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were reasonable creatures. "Why do you keep moving about then," he said, "making faces and all that--sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?" "I don't," said the picture. "You _do_," said Harringay. "It's yourself," said the picture. "It's _not_ myself," said Harringay. "It _is_ yourself," said the picture. "No! don't go hitting me with paint again, because it's true. You have been trying to fluke an expression on my face all the morning. Really, you haven't an idea what your picture ought to look like." "I have," said Harringay. "You have _not_," said the picture: "You _never_ have with your pictures. You always start with the vaguest presentiment of what you are going to do; it is to be something beautiful--you are sure of that--and devout, perhaps, or tragic; but beyond that it is all experiment and chance. My dear fellow! you don't think you can paint a picture like that?" Now it must be remembered that for what follows we have only Harringay's word. "I shall paint a picture exactly as I like," said Harringay, calmly. This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. "You can't paint a picture without an inspiration," it remarked. "But I _had_ an inspiration--for this." "Inspiration!" sneered the sardonic figure; "a fancy that came from your seeing an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! Ha, ha! You just started painting on the chance of something coming--that's what you did. And when I saw you at it I came. I want a talk with you!"