Just a wavering irresolute flame on its saw-cut end, and a red glow, and that was all it had left behind.

"Who spoke?" It was Mr. Pelly who asked the question. But no one had spoken, apparently. Yet he would have sworn that he heard a woman's voice speaking in Italian. How funny that the associations of an Italian manuscript should creep into his dream!—that was all Mr. Pelly thought about it. For the manuscript was almost entirely English rendering, and no one in it, so far as he could recollect, had said as this voice did, "Good-evening, Signore!" It was a dream! He polished his spectacles and watched the glowing log that bridged an incandescent valley, and wondered what the sudden births of little intense white light could be that came and lived on nothing and vanished, unaccounted for. He knew Science knew, and would ask her, next time they met. But, for now, he would be content to sit still, and keep watch on that log. It must break across the middle soon, and collapse into the valley in a blaze of sparks.

Watching a fire, without other light in the room, is fraught with sleep to one who has lately dined, even if he has a pipe or cigar in his mouth to burn him awake when he drops it. Much more so to a secure non-smoker, like Mr. Pelly. Probably he did go to sleep again—but who can say? He really believed himself wide-awake, though, when the same voice came again; not loud, to be sure, but unmistakable. And the way it startled him helped to convince him he was awake. Because one is never surprised at anything in a dream. When one finds oneself at Church in a stocking, and nothing more, one is vexed and embarrassed, certainly, but not surprised. It dawns on one gradually. If this was a dream, it was a very solid one, to survive Mr. Pelly's start of amazement. It brought him out of his chair, and set him looking about in the half-lighted room for a speaker, somewhere.

"Who are you, and where are you?" said he. For there was no one to be seen. The firelight flickered on the portraits of Sir Stephen Upwell, the Cavalier, who was killed at Naseby, and Marjory, his wife, who was a Parliamentarian fanatic; and a phenomenal trout in a glass case, with a picture behind it showing the late Baronet in the distance striving to catch it; but the door was shut, and Mr. Pelly was alone in the library. He was rather frightened at his own voice in the stillness; it sounded like delirium. So it made him happier that an answer should come, and justify it.

"I am here, before you. Look at me! I am La Risvegliata—that is what you call me, at least." This was spoken in Italian, but it must be translated in the story. Very likely you understand Italian, but remember how many English do not. Mr. Pelly spoke Italian fluently—he spoke many languages—but he must be turned into English, too, for the same reason.

"But you are a picture," said he. "You cannot speak." For he understood then that his hallucination—as he thought it, believing himself awake—was that the picture-woman over the mantelpiece had spoken to him. He felt indignant with himself for so easily falling a victim to a delusion; and transferred his indignation, naturally, to the blameless phantom of his own creation. Of course, he had imagined that the picture had spoken to him. For "La Risvegliata"—the awakened one—was the name that had been written on the frame at the wish of the Baronet's daughter, when a few months back he brought this picture, by an unknown Artist, from Italy.

"I can speak"—so it replied to Mr. Pelly—"and you can hear me, as I have heard you all speaking about me, ever since I came to this strange land. Any picture can hear that is well enough painted."

"Why have you never spoken before?" Mr. Pelly was dumbfounded at the unreasonableness of the position. A speaking picture was bad enough; but, at least, it might be rational. He fell in his own good opinion, at this inconsistency of his distempered fancy.

"Why have you never listened? I have spoken many a time. How do I know why you have not heard?" Mr. Pelly could not answer, and the voice continued, "Oh, how I have longed and waited for one of you to catch my voice! How I have cried out to the wooden Marchese whose Marchesa will not allow him to speak, and to that beautiful Signora herself, and to that sweet daughter most of all. Oh, why—why—have they not heard me?" But still Mr. Pelly was slow to answer. He found something to say, though, in the end.

"I can entertain no reasonable doubt that your voice is a fiction of my imagination. But you will confer a substantial favour on me if you will take advantage of it, while my hallucination lasts, to tell me the name of your author—of the artist who painted you."

"Lo Spazzolone painted me."

"Lo ... who?"

"Lo Spazzolone. Surely, all men have heard of him. But it is his nickname—the big brush—from his great bush of black hair. Ah me!—how beautiful it was!"

"Could you give me his real name, and tell me something about him?" Mr. Pelly took from his pocket a notebook and pencil.

"Giacinto Boldrini, of course!"

"Ought I to know him? I have never heard his name."

"How strange! And it is but the other day that he was murdered—oh, so foully murdered! But no!—I am wrong, and I forget. It is near four hundred years ago."

Mr. Pelly was deeply interested. The question of whether this was a dream, a hallucination, or a vision, or the result of exceeding by two ounces his usual allowance of glasses of Madeira, he could not answer offhand. Besides, there would be plenty of time for that after. His present object should be to let nothing slip, however much he felt convinced of its illusory character. It could be sifted later. He would be passive, and not allow an ill-timed incredulity to mar a good delusion in the middle. He switched off scepticism for the time being, and spoke sympathetically.

"Is it possible? Did you know him? But of course you must have known him, or he could scarcely have painted you. Dear me!" Mr. Pelly checked a disposition to gasp; that would never do—he might wake himself up, and spoil all. The sweet voice of the picture—it was like a voice, mind you, not like a gramophone—was prompt with its reply:

"I knew him well. But, oh, so long ago! One gets to doubt everything—all that was most real once, that made the very core of our lives. Sometimes I think it was a dream—a sweet dream with terror at the end—a nectar-cup a basilisk was watching, all the while. Four hundred years! Can I be sure it was true? Yet I remember it all—could tell it now and miss nothing."