But there were compensations. One was the full-length portrait over the chimney-piece in the dining-room. Pépin had no conception of how great was the signature it bore, or of the fabulous sum which it had cost, but he knew it was very beautiful, and, besides, it was his mother,--the sad-eyed, pale dream-mother he had never seen. The portrait of the Comtesse de Villersexel had been one of the sensations at the Salon of seven years before. The young Brazilian was represented at the moment when the bow left the strings of her violin, and on her lips and in her eyes yet dwelt the spirit of the music she had been playing. A clinging gown of ivory-white silk emphasized rather than hid the lines of her figure, of strangely girlish slenderness, but straight and proud as that of a young empress. In its frailty lay the keynote of the portrait's charm. It was like a reflection in clear water that a touch might disturb, or a young anemone that a breath might destroy,--not a picture before which people disputed and proffered noisy opinions, but one which imposed silence, like the barely audible note of a distant Angelus. It stood before the memory of its original, as it had been a spirit, finger on lip, at the doorway of a tomb. This portrait of his mother dominated the life of Pépin like the half-remembered substance of a dream. He had known nothing of her in the life, for the breath of being had passed from her lips to his at the moment of his birth, but with the intuition of childhood, he seemed to know that this was one who would have loved him and whom he would have loved. He spent hours before the picture, silent, spell-bound, gazing into the deep and tender eyes that shone with the same pathetic pleading that lay so eloquently in his own, and the only outbreak of rage which had ever stirred his simple serenity was on one occasion when his nurse had found him thus absorbed, and, receiving no response to her summons, half alarmed and half indignant, reproached him with wasting his time before a stupid picture. Then Pépin had whirled around upon her, his lips compressed, his small brown hands clenched, and a look in his eyes that terrified even the stout and prosaic Cornish-woman out of her accustomed attitude of fat complacency. "A stupid picture?" he stormed. "But it is my mother, do you hear, my mother! You are a wicked woman, Elizabeth!"