What nameless grief, what fearful shame, what hateful abandonment was thus being hidden by that rejected one, that lingering victim of love, of whose unknown story one might for ever dream with tortured heart?
It could be divined that she was adorably young and beautiful in her wretchedness, in the shred of linen draped about her shoulders; but a mystery enveloped everything else--her passion, possibly her misfortune, perhaps even her transgression--unless, indeed, she were there merely as a symbol of all that shivers and that weeps visageless before the ever closed portals of the unknown.

For a long time Pierre looked at her, and so intently that he at last imagined he could distinguish her profile, divine in its purity and expression of suffering.

But this was only an illusion; the painting had greatly suffered, blackened by time and neglect; and he asked himself whose work it might be that it should move him so intensely.

On the adjoining wall a picture of a Madonna, a bad copy of an eighteenth-century painting, irritated him by the banality of its smile.
Night was falling faster and faster, and, opening the sitting-room window, Pierre leant out.

On the other bank of the Tiber facing him arose the Janiculum, the height whence he had gazed upon Rome that morning.