“Is it not?” he said; “and would not you love an art that enabled you so to record impressions of beauty?”
“It is an impression, my faith! Am I black and white like a spectre? Where are my brown hair and my red cheeks?”
Ned tapped his breast-pocket.
“In your heart, monsieur?”
“In my paint-box, mademoiselle.”
“Well,” she said, “they may remain there, for me. I shall never come to claim them.”
“You had best not,” he said. “It is full of ghosts that might frighten or repel you.”
She was moving away, when she stopped suddenly.
“Look who comes!” she cried low. “There is the pretty subject for your pencil!”
The fountain stood at the village head, on ground somewhat raised above the wide street, or Place, round which the hamlet was gathered. Not a soul seemed to be abroad in the hot sleepy morning. The jalousies of twenty small houses were closed; the ground-haze boiled up a fair man’s height as seen against any dark background; the tower of the little white church looked as if its very peaked cap of lead were melting and sinking over its eyes—an illusion grotesquely accented by the exclamatory expression of the arrow-slit of a window underneath. There was scarce a sound, even, to emphasise the stillness—the tinkle of a running gutter, the drowsy weak ring of iron on a distant anvil—these were all. Méricourt lay sunk in panting slumber in the lap of its woods, its chimney-pots gasping at an inexorable sky.