She moved away from him and stood opposite her veiled canvas,—­then as Florian followed and joined her, with a swift action which had something of defiance as well as grace in it, she swept aside the concealing curtain.  Florian recoiled with an involuntary cry,—­and then remained motionless and silent,—­stricken dumb and stupid by the magnificent creation which confronted him.  This Angela’s masterpiece!  A woman’s work!  This stupendous conception!  This perfect drawing!  This wondrous colouring!  Fully facing him, the central glory of the whole picture, was a figure of Christ—­unlike any other Christ ever imagined by poet or painter—­an etherealised Form through which the very light of Heaven itself seemed to shine,- -supreme, majestic, and austerely God-like;—­the face was more beautiful than any ever dreamed of by the hewers of the classic marbles—­it was the face of a great Archangel,—­beardless and youthful, yet kingly and commanding.  Round the broad brows a Crown of Thorns shone like a diadem, every prickly point tipped with pale fire,—­and from the light floating folds of intense white which, cloud-like, clung about the divine Form, faint flashes of the lightning gleamed.  Above this grand Christ, the heavens were opened, pouring out a rain of such translucent purity of colour and radiance as never had been seen in any painted canvas before—­but beneath, the clouds were black as midnight—­confused, chaotic, and drifting darkly on a strong wind as it seemed into weird and witch-like shapes, wherein there were seen the sun and moon revolving pallidly, like globes of fire lost from their orbits and about to become extinct.  And among those shifting black films were a crowd of human creatures, floating and falling into unknown depths of darkness, and striking out wild arms of appeal and entreaty and despair,—­the faces of these were all familiar, and were the life-like portraits of many of those pre-eminent in the history of the time.  Chief among them was the Sovereign Pontiff, waxen and wan and dark-eyed,—­ he was depicted as fastening fetters of iron round the body of a beautiful youth, laurel-crowned, the leaves of the laurel bearing faint gold letters which spelt the word “Science.”  Huddled beside him was a well-known leader of the Jesuits, busily counting up heaps of gold,—­another remarkable figure was that of a well-known magnate of the Church of England, who, leaning forward eagerly, sought to grasp and hold the garment of the Pope, but was dragged back by the hand of a woman crowned with an Imperial diadem.  After these and other principal personages came a confusion of faces—­all recognisable, yet needing study to discern;—­creatures drifting downwardly into the darkness,—­one was the vivisectionist whose name was celebrated through France, clutching at his bleeding victim and borne relentlessly onwards by the whirlwind,—­and forms and faces belong to men of every description of Church-doctrine were seen trampling underneath