'Do you think I might have a little more?' she asked, presently. 'Only half a glass!'
Logotheti filled the glass again, though she laughingly protested that half a glass was all she wanted. But he took none himself.
Margaret saw a picture at the other end of the room which attracted her attention, and she rose to go and look at it. Logotheti followed her, but Madame De Rosa, who had established her small person in the most comfortable arm-chair in the room, was too much interested in the maraschino to move. Margaret stood in silence before the painting for a few moments, and Logotheti waited for her to speak, watching her as he always did when she was not looking.
'What is it?' she asked, at last. 'It's quite beautiful, but I don't understand it.'
'Nor do I, in the least,' answered Logotheti. 'I found it in Italy two years ago. It's what they call an encaustic painting, like the Muse of Cortona, probably of the time of Tiberius. It is painted on a slab of slate three inches thick, and burnt in by a process that is lost. You might put it into the fire and leave it there without doing it any harm. That much I know, for I found it built into a baker's oven. But I can tell you no more about it. I have some pretty good things here, but this is quite my best picture. It is very like somebody, too—uncommonly like! Do you see the resemblance?'
'No. I suppose I don't know the person.'
Logotheti laughed and took up a little mirror set in an old Spanish frame.
'Look at yourself,' he said. 'The picture is the image of you.'
'Of me?' Margaret took the glass, and her cheek flushed a little as she looked at herself and then at the picture, and realised that the likeness was not imaginary.
'In future,' said Logotheti, 'I shall tell people that it is a portrait of you.'