He took up a magnifying-glass, and passed it to Gerald, who peered through it intently, all along the rim of the cast.
“No word here,” said Gerald. He passed his fingers around the circling edge, as if, after all, a sculptor’s fingers were more to be trusted than a glass. “No, there’s nothing, really! The face must have told its own name. But tell me, Stevedear, if you don’t mind,—did you yourself really forgive, in the end?”
Steven Grant smiled, and replaced the cast above his hearth-fire. Before answering, he rumpled Gerald’s hair, exposing the too high forehead.
“Your question, my boy, makes me think of Mrs. Storms. Because, like that lady, it is not exactly a wrong ’un, but still, it comes very near the danger line.”
And Gerald knew it was time to turn from the past to the present, and to talk of the dinner, that masterpiece. Besides, as Steven Grant had guessed, the younger sculptor was longing to speak of his own Anita, that most beautiful lady whose shining train he had hovered over, at the door of the glass coach. The elder man rejoiced with all his heart that there was no Emancipation group to thwart his nephew’s happiness. In honor of Gerald’s Anita, he was loyally ready to shout with the best, “Long live the Queen!” But he did not say to himself, sorrowfully, of the earlier Anita, “The Queen is dead.” He saw in his mind the face called Forgiveness. He listened to the German cabinet-maker, the French painter, the Italian girl, the American student. There were others, too, coming and going in the Museum; and what they said of the face made him think of life, not death.
THE ARTIST’S BIRTHDAY
One winter evening, in a snugly built little stone cottage near the northern border of Vermont, a young family of three had gathered beside a glowing hearth and a cheerful lamp to enjoy an hour of that contentment which is most deeply felt when the fire is bright, the curtain closely drawn, and a storm is raging without. It was the birthday of the child Samuel. He was three years old, and as a birthday indulgence, he was to sit up until seven o’clock, and carve things with the jack-knife that his father, himself a carver of renown, had brought him as a birthday gift. This was by no means his first adventure with a knife. For a year or more he had managed a knife, at first feebly, but later with an astonishing ease. His father was proud of the infant Phidias, and even his mother had ceased to be terror-stricken at the conjunction of child and knife. The motions of the boy Samuel were happy and accurate. At the present hour, such gestures as his would be called eurhythmic, or something of that sort; even in those days of preposterous precocity, he was regarded with wonder.