Looking at the face and expression of this fair signorina, we seem to comprehend readily enough, that she is undergoing one or another of those troubles of the heart to which young ladies are but too liable.

But what is this blood-stain?
And what has innocence to do with it?
Has she stabbed her perfidious lover with a bodkin ?" "She! she commit a crime!" cried the young artist.

"Can you look at the innocent anguish in her face, and ask that question?
No; but, as I read the mystery, a man has been slain in her presence, and the blood, spurting accidentally on her white robe, has made a stain which eats into her life." "Then, in the name of her patron saint," exclaimed the picture dealer, "why don't she get the robe made white again at the expense of a few baiocchi to her washerwoman?
No, no, my dear Panini.

The picture being now my property, I shall call it 'The Signorina's Vengeance.' She has stabbed her lover overnight, and is repenting it betimes the next morning.

So interpreted, the picture becomes an intelligible and very natural representation of a not uncommon fact." Thus coarsely does the world translate all finer griefs that meet its eye.