Such, in a measure, was Hyacinthe King at twenty--a curious compound of beauty, unspent _verve_, irritated longings, half-superstitious imaginings, and half-developed impulses, ideas and mental powers; practically, an assistant to the worn mother in her household duties, a haunter of the beautiful places in the city of her adoption, an occasional mingler in the scant festivities of artists, a good linguist, knowing English thoroughly and speaking French and German with fluent accuracy. Watch her, with me, as she walks one spring day along the narrow Via Robbia, down which a slip of sunlight glints scantily on her young head, and, emerging into a wider thoroughfare, ascends at last the Scala Regia of the Vatican. The girl is known there, and the usually not over-courteous officials allow her to pass on at her will through hall after hall of splendor and priceless treasure. She is neither an English tourist with Baedeker, Murray and a note-book, nor an American traveller with pencil, loose leaves and a possible photographic apparatus in her pocket: therefore to the vigilant eye of the guardian of the pope's palace she is an innocuous being. Hyacinthe glides quietly through the Clementino Museum, with never a glance for the lovely, blooming Mercury of the Belvedere, or even one peep in at the cabinet where the sad Laocoön for ever writhes in impotent struggles, or a look of love for rare and radiant Apollo, or one of surprise for Hercules with the Nemean lion. She has reached the Hall of Statues--that superb gallery with its subtly-tesselated pavement, its grand marble columns with their Ionic capitals, its arches and walls of wondrous marbles--and here she stops with a little sigh before the Cupid of Praxiteles, shorn of his wings by ruthless Time or some still more ruthless human destroyer. But oh the lovesomeness of that wingless Love, the sensuous psalmody that seems about to part the young lips, and the glad eyes one may fancy glancing under that careless infant brow! Hyacinthe stands before it a long, long time while many parties come in and go out, and only moves on a little when an insolent young Frenchman offers a surmise as to her being a statue herself. She moves only as far as Ariadne: the _jeune Français_ has made a progressive movement also, and notes behind his Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks something like the marble. She does. Though the grief of the face of the daughter of Minos as she lies deserted by her lover on the rocky shore of Naxos be a poignant and a present woe, there is the shadow of its mate on the brow and lips of the girl who gazes at its pure and pallid and all-unavailing loveliness.