“Perhaps, for there is no limit to the wild extravagance of Hope’s imaginings at such an age.”
“Do you call that, then, one of her wild, extravagant delusions?”
“No; my heart tells me it is not. I might have thought so once, but now, I say, give me the girl I love, and I will swear eternal constancy to her and her alone, through summer and winter, through youth and age, and life and death! if age and death must come.”
He spoke this in such serious earnest that my heart bounded with delight; but the minute after he changed his tone, and asked, with a significant smile, if I had “any more portraits.”
“No,” replied I, reddening with confusion and wrath.
But my portfolio was on the table: he took it up, and coolly sat down to examine its contents.
“Mr. Huntingdon, those are my unfinished sketches,” cried I, “and I never let any one see them.”
And I placed my hand on the portfolio to wrest it from him, but he maintained his hold, assuring me that he “liked unfinished sketches of all things.”
“But I hate them to be seen,” returned I. “I can’t let you have it, indeed!”
“Let me have its bowels then,” said he; and just as I wrenched the portfolio from his hand, he deftly abstracted the greater part of its contents, and after turning them over a moment he cried out,—“Bless my stars, here’s another;” and slipped a small oval of ivory paper into his waistcoat pocket—a complete miniature portrait that I had sketched with such tolerable success as to be induced to colour it with great pains and care. But I was determined he should not keep it.