"Yes," he answered, "just as you did before. I want to make a portrait worthy of you, as this is not. Let me tell you, on the canvas, what I cannot--" he hesitated then said deliberately--"what I _dare_ not put into words."
The woman received his words as a veiled declaration of a passion he dared not, yet, openly express. She thought his request a clever ruse to renew their meetings in the privacy of his studio, and was, accordingly delighted.
"Oh, that will be wonderful!--heavenly!" she cried, springing to her feet. "Can we begin at once? May I come to-morrow?"
"Yes, indeed! I want you just as you were before--the same dress, the same pose. It is to be the same picture, you understand, only a better one--one more worthy of us, both. And now," he continued hurriedly "don't you think that we should return to the house?"
"I suppose so," she answered regretfully--lingering.
As they passed out, she placed her hand on his arm, and looked up into his face admiringly. "What a clever, clever man you are, to think of it! And what a story it will make for the papers--when my picture is shown--how you were not satisfied with the portrait and refused to let it go--and how, after keeping it in your studio for months, you repainted it, to satisfy your artistic conscience!"
The announcement in the house that the artist was to repaint Mrs. Taine's picture, provoked characteristic comment. Louise effervesced a frothy stream of bubbling exclamations. James Rutlidge gave a hearty, "By Jove, old man, you have nerve! If you can really improve on that canvas, you are a wonder." And Mr. Taine, under the watchful eye of his beautiful wife, responded with a husky whisper, "Quite right--my boy--quite right! Certainly--by all means--if you feel that way about it--" his consent and approval ending in a paroxysm of coughing that left him weak and breathless, and nearly eliminated him from the question, altogether.
When the Fairlands Heights party had departed, Conrad Lagrange looked the artist up and down.
"Well,"--he growled harshly, in his most brutal tones,--"what is it? Is the dog returning to his vomit?--or is the prodigal turning his back on his hogs and his husks?"
Aaron King smiled as he answered, "I think, rather, it's the case of the blind beggar who sat by the roadside, helpless, until a certain Great Physician passed that way."