The lady glanced secretly at her cavalier, with an approving tenderness. He fulfilled her expectations of him—stood appropriately in the foreground of the picture of mysterious melancholy her fancy had painted to receive him.
“I could not breakfast on manna,” she said, with a full little laugh. “What sugar-babies the Israelites must have been! But I have often gone without breakfast at all when sketching, so completely has the pleasure absorbed me.”
“You are an artist, too!”
She owned that she was; and, indeed, she had quite a skill in making pretty little copies of landscapes after Turner, Bright, Stothard, and others, which she signed with her own name. Less often she ventured upon art at first hand. She had penetration enough to mentally appraise that subtle distinction shown by friends in the degrees of admiration accorded respectively her imitative and her original work.
Now, however, in the assurance of appreciative comment, she was moved to reach for the manna she would have herself believe she despised.
“That is one of my poor originals,” she said, inviting him by a gesture to an escritoire on which lay an open sketch-book.
He took it up, as a priest lifts the Gospels; though not—in further illustration—to kiss it. Here his reverence halted on the brink of perplexity.
“Do you know what it is?” she murmured slyly, but a little anxiously “You ought to.”
“Of course,” he said—almost in a perspiration already. “It is—it is a gate, is it not?”
She was disappointed at the outset.