"I love it."
He went out a few minutes later to telephone for her to Mrs. Lescott, and gave Adrienne carte blanche to browse among his portfolios and stacked canvases until his return. In a few minutes, she discovered one of those efforts which she called his "rebellious pictures."
These were such things as he painted, using no model except memory perhaps, not for the making of finished pictures, but merely to give outlet to his feelings; an outlet which some men might have found in talk.
This particular canvas was roughly blocked in, and it was elementally simple, but each brush stroke had been thrown against the surface with the concentrated fire and energy of a blow, except the strokes that had painted the face, and there the brush had seemed to kiss the canvas. The picture showed a barefooted girl, standing, in barbaric simplicity of dress, in the glare of the arena, while a gaunt lion crouched eying her. Her head was lifted as though she were listening to faraway music. In the eyes was indomitable courage. That canvas was at once a declaration of love, and a miserere. Adrienne set it up beside her own portrait, and, as she studied the two with her chin resting on her gloved hand, her eyes cleared of questioning. Now, she knew what she missed in her own more beautiful likeness. It had been painted with all the admiration of the mind. This other had been dashed off straight from the heart—and this other was Sally! She replaced the sketch where she had found it, and Samson, returning, found her busy with little sketches of the Seine.
* * * * *
"Drennie," pleaded Wilfred Horton, as the two leaned on the deck rail of the Mauretania, returning from Europe, "are you going to hold me off indefinitely? I've served my seven years for Rachel, and thrown in some extra time. Am I no nearer the goal?"
The girl looked at the oily heave of the leaden and cheerless Atlantic, and its somber tones found reflection in her eyes. She shook her head.
"I wish I knew," she said, wearily. Then, she added, vehemently: "I'm not worth it, Wilfred. Let me go. Chuck me out of your life as a little pig who can't read her own heart; who is too utterly selfish to decide upon her own life."
"Is it"—he put the question with foreboding—"that, after all, I was a prophet? Have you—and South—wiped your feet on the doormat marked 'Platonic friendship'? Have you done that, Drennie?"
She looked up into his eyes. Her own were wide and honest and very full of pain.