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Rh the Third, in 1762. When I saw that face at the opera I said to myself, it might have been the face of Madame Lapukin, waiting for an opportunity of vengeance, and when the Academy announced their subject I thought of that terrible tragedy, and I saw the woman ministering to the dying on the road to Siberia, praying for death as she must have done, and seeing more fortunate ones stumble and fall, to be left in the wind and the snow, that was not so cold and bleak as man's inhumanity. I saw her moved by the tender impulse of her sex in the midst of her own suffering to lay a gentle hand upon the shrinking arm of her fellow prisoner, and followed by the Cossack's rough interposition, and then I saw that look of hate, of unavenged grief, of tiger-like defiance that fascinated me in the face draped by the opera curtains. Around this incident grew at once all the rest, and I have written right across it in my mind's eye, 'Tragedy.

"You are a brave, wonderful fellow," said Dick, rising and taking him by the hand; "if you were not a painter to have this outcome for your feelings, or a poet to put them into print, you would be a Nihilist, and possibly a victim to some mad plot to overtake the future by blowing up the Winter Palace and shouting 'victory' as you fell under the crashing timbers."

"Do you think so?" he said, with a sad smile, the color returning to his face, which had become as pale as the imaginary Lapukin's, while he was telling the woman's story.

"I do; but this saves you," pointing to the sketch; "and it is a greater power than dynamite, a bigger reformer than the knife or the revolver. Put your heroism into your pictures, Philip, and I will forgive you for not being a politician."

"That's all right," said Philip; "anyhow we shall always be friends, and if I can satisfy your critical opinion I shall be content to lose the medal."