Master exhorted the artists to give pencils to Christ and his Mother, and seek for her image among pious and holy women living a veiled and secluded life, like that our Lady lived before the blessed Annunciation.  ‘Think you,’ he said, ’that the blessed Angelico obtained the grace to set forth our Lady in such heavenly wise by gazing about the streets on mincing women tricked out in all the world’s bravery?—­or did he not find her image in holy solitudes, among modest and prayerful saints?’”

“Ah,” said Agnes, drawing in her breath with an expression of awe, “what mortal would dare to sit for the image of our Lady!”

“Dear child, there be women whom the Lord crowns with beauty when they know it not, and our dear Mother sheds so much of her spirit into their hearts that it shines out in their faces; and among such must the painter look.  Dear little child, be not ignorant that our Lord hath shed this great grace on thee.  I have received a light that thou art to be the model for the ‘Hail, Mary!’ in my Breviary.”

“Oh, no, no, no! it cannot be!” said Agnes, covering her face with her hands.

“My daughter, thou art very beautiful, and this beauty was given thee not for thyself, but to be laid like a sweet flower on the altar of thy Lord.  Think how blessed, if, through thee, the faithful be reminded of the modesty and humility of Mary, so that their prayers become more fervent,—­would it not be a great grace?”

“Dear uncle,”—­said Agnes, “I am Christ’s child.  If it be as you say,—­which I did not know,—­give me some days to pray and prepare my soul, that I may offer myself in all humility.”

During this conversation Elsie had left the garden and gone a little way down the gorge, to have a few moments of gossip with an old crony.  The light of the evening sky had gradually faded away, and the full moon was pouring a shower of silver upon the orange-trees.  As Agnes sat on the parapet, with the moonlight streaming down on her young, spiritual face, now tremulous with deep suppressed emotion, the painter thought he had never seen any human creature that looked nearer to his conception of a celestial being.

They both sat awhile in that kind of quietude which often falls between two who have stirred some deep fountain of emotion.  All was so still around them, that the drip and trickle of the little stream which fell from the garden wall into the dark abyss of the gorge could well be heard as it pattered from one rocky point to another, with a slender, lulling sound.

Suddenly the reveries of the two were disturbed by the shadow of a figure which passed into the moonlight and seemed to rise from the side of the gorge.  A man enveloped in a dark cloak with a peaked hood stepped across the moss-grown garden parapet, stood a moment irresolute, then the cloak dropped suddenly from him, and the Cavalier stood in the moonlight before Agnes.  He bore in his hand a tall stalk