Diana's serene gaze did not falter, though her color rose.
"I do not mind your badinage," she returned, "for when I fall in love, it is going to be with a supremely unattractive man externally. I shall be the only woman who knows and understands his charm, then other women will not infringe my rights. After you hear Mr. Barrison sing, you will understand that in his career, women will bow before him like flowers in an irresistible gust of wind. I cannot imagine a worse fate for a girl than to share that career; the more brilliant it might be, the more crushing to her happiness. But this interview is getting turned about. I was to be the confidante, not you."
"Then this is my tale, my dear," said Mrs. Lowell. "I have discovered who did those sketches Mr. Gayne showed us this morning."
"Then you were right, and they were not his own?"
"Bertie's mother did them, and he inherits her talent: this poor child whom the man is trying to blot out of normal life."
"What makes you certain?"
"Because he did one before my eyes down by the shore to-day, with a swift, sure touch, and that thin, sad face of his lighted till he looked like a different being. His parents are dead. His mother was an artist. He worked with her. As soon as she left the child, his uncle forbade him to draw, and took all his materials away from him, whipped him if he found a pencil in his possession. Those sketches we saw were done either by the boy or his mother. There is no doubt of it. She eloped with his father, estranging her family from her. She was a Loring of Boston."
Diana regarded the speaker with admiration. "How wonderful for you to obtain so much information from such a source."
"Oh, it was little by little, of course. I told him his uncle had shown us some good sketches and asked him if it was not strange that Mr. Gayne could do them, taking up the art so late in life; for it seems he took it up only as Bertie laid it down; and the boy's reply was significant. He said: 'Oh, no, it is easy.' He seemed to have no suspicion, but then he hasn't life or interest enough to harbor suspicion. He just endures."