"Have you seen his portrait of this Mr. Poole?" she inquired.
"Not yet," he replied, "but they tell me it's a dandy. I've never met Poole, but I used to know his wife. She was Eunice Cameron, and she's a cousin of Brashleigh's. Come to think of it, his first hit was a portrait of her at the Academy three years ago."
"What sort of a girl is she?" Miss Marlenspuyk asked.
"For one thing, she's a good-looker," he responded, "although they say she's gone off a little lately; I haven't seen her this year. But when Brashleigh introduced me to her she was a mighty pretty girl, I can tell you."
The pressure of the crowd had carried them along, and now Miss Marlenspuyk found herself once more in front of the "Portrait of a Gentleman," and once more she was seized by the power and by the evil which the artist had painted on the face of Cyrus Poole.
"They used to say," Harry Brackett went on, not looking at the picture, "that Brashleigh was in love with her. I think somebody or other once told me that they were engaged."
There was a sudden gleam of intelligence in Miss Marlenspuyk's eyes.
"But of course there wasn't any truth in it," he continued.
The smile came back to the old maid's mouth as she gazed steadily at the portrait before her and answered, "Of course not."
(1893.)