“Not at all. Just human. But—really I must be going,” said he briskly.
“When shall I see you again?” And she tried to speak steadily, with smiling eyes.
“Let me see. I’ll be back in two or three days. In a week or ten days I’ll have that picture about done. I suppose you’d like to see it. I’ll send your mother a note, asking her to bring you. Well—good-by, Rix.”
He took her hand, released it. She stood, paling and flushing and trembling. “Is that—all?” she murmured. “Won’t you—” Voice failed her.
He bent and kissed her hair at her temple. Suddenly she flung her arms round his neck, kissed him passionately, her embrace tight; and a shower of tears rained upon his cheek. With a hysterical cry more like joy than like grief, yet like neither, she flung herself free, sprang into the canoe and pushed off. And she went her way and he his without either looking back.
VII
MR. RICHMOND CALLS
Roger was working in the studio, with doors and windows wide. It was fiercely hot. He had reduced his costume to outing shirt and old flannel trousers—the kind they make in the Latin Quarter—baggy at the hips, tapering to a close fit at the ankles and hanging with a careless, comfortable, yet not ungraceful looseness. He was working at the picture. He had not decided on a name for it. Should he call it April?—or Dawn?—or The Water Witch? Or should he give it its proper name—Rix? That title would mean nothing to anyone save himself. But to him the picture meant nothing else. True, there was landscape in it; the play of early morning light on foliage, on leaping water, on placid water made it the best landscape he had ever done—incomparably the best. The canoe, too, was a marvel in its way. But the girl—there was the picture! He made another infinitesimal change—it would have been impossible to count the number of those changes he had made. Then he stood off at a little distance to look again.
“Is it in the canvas—or is it in my mind?” said he aloud.
He could not tell. He rather feared he was largely imagining the wonders he thought he saw in that pictured face and form.
“It may be rotten, and I a fool hypnotized by her and by my own vanity, for all I know. But—what do I care? I am getting the pleasure.”