"So you think him a darling, do you?" he asked, and somehow his voice did not sound quite as harsh as it had done four years ago.
Miss Downs had passed on, and there was no one standing near them, no one at all in the gallery who shared Di's knowledge of the strange situation. She felt sure that the old man had no suspicion of her identity.
"What makes a darling of him?" the old gentleman inquired.
Di felt that this was her opportunity, and that she was letting it slip. But she could not help herself, and she only answered rather lamely:
"Oh, nothing, except that he is _such a good grandfather!_" Upon which she beat a hasty retreat, and fled to the protection of Miss Downs, whom she found in an adjoining room.
It was perhaps twenty minutes later that Di and her teacher passed the picture again, and, behold, there was the old gentleman standing, lost in thought, exactly on the spot where she had left him. He did not seem to be looking at the picture, but Di felt certain that he was thinking of it. And, suddenly, it passed through her mind like a flash that he was sorry.
"Yes; he's sorry," she said to herself. "He's sorry, and he doesn't know how to say so!"
The more she thought of it in the days that followed,--and she seemed to be thinking pretty much all the time of the old man and the look on his face as he stood before the picture,--the more convinced she became that he was sorry and did not know how to say so.
"And he ought not to have to say so," she told herself. "He's an old, old man, and he ought not to have to say that he is sorry."
The old, old man--aged sixty-five--might have taken exception to that part of her proposition touching his extreme antiquity, but we may be pretty sure that he would have cordially endorsed her opinion that the dignity of his years forbade his saying that he was sorry.
In those days Di used to walk often past her grandfather's house. It was a very big house for a single occupant. Even the stout footman, whom she had once seen at the door, did not seem stout enough, nor numerous enough to relieve the big house of its vacancy. There were heavy woollen draperies in the parlor windows, but not a hint of the pretty white muslin which a woman would have had up in no time. Once she passed the house just at dusk, after the lights were lighted. Through the long windows she looked into the empty room. Not so much as a cat or a dog was awaiting the master. In the swift glance with which she swept the interior she noted that the fireplace was boarded in. That seemed to Di indescribably dreary. Perhaps her grandfather did not sit here; perhaps he had a library somewhere, like their own. But, no; there was the portly footman entering with the evening paper, which he laid upon the table before coming to close the shutters.