She stood there for a moment or two, then began to pace the room with a lithe, undulating grace. It was a pity that she was alone, because such beauty and grace were wasted on the desert air of the rather grim and dingy room. It was a pity that Sir John Everett Millais, or Mr. Edwin Long, or some other of the great portrait painters were not present to transfer her beauty of face and form, for it was a loveliness of no common order.
Many a poet’s pen had attempted to describe Doris Marlowe, but it may safely be said that not one had succeeded; and not even a great portrait painter could have depicted the mobility of her clear, oval face, and its dark eyes and sensitive lips—eyes and lips so full of expression that people were sometimes almost convinced that she had spoken before she had uttered a word.
This evening, and at this moment, her face was all alive, as it were, with expression, as she put up her hand to smooth back the thick tresses of dark brown hair—so dark that it was almost black—and, stopping suddenly before a pier glass which stood at the end of the room, repeated the familiar lines:
“Good-night! Good-night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good-night till it be morrow!”
“Ah, no! No, no, no!” she exclaimed, stamping her foot and drawing her brows together at the reflection in the glass. “That is not it, nor anything like it. I shall never get it! Never! Nev——”
The door opened behind her, and she turned her wistful, dissatisfied, restless face over her shoulder toward the comer. It was an old man, bent almost double, with a thin and haggard face, from which gleamed a pair of dark eyes so brilliant and peering that they made the rest of the face look almost lifeless. He looked at her keenly, as he paused as if for breath, and, still looking at her, went to the table and laid a long roll of paper upon it; then he sank into a chair, and, leaning on his stick, said, in a hollow voice:
“Well?”
“But it isn’t well, Jeffrey. It’s bad, as bad as could be!” and the mobile lips allowed a quick, impatient laugh to escape, then compressed themselves as if annoyed at their levity. “I cannot do it! I cannot! I have tried it a hundred times, a thousand times! And it sounds more like—oh, it sounds more like a servant-maid saying, ‘Good-night, good-night, call me at seven to-morrow!’ than Juliet’s immortal adieu!”
“Does it?” said the old man, calmly.
“Yes, it does; very much!” she retorted, half laughing again. “Oh, Jeffrey, I can’t do it, and that is the simple truth! Tell them I cannot do it, and—and beg me off.”