"Why, put all the crossness out of your personality into the picture, and then you'll never be cross any more. Oh, I'm so glad I thought of that!"
Frank had picked up the charcoal and put a few finishing lines to the face.
"I've drawn it in carefully and freely, as if it was a black-and-white sketch," he said. "There, that's what I saw all morning, except just when you were breakfasting here."
"Oh, Frank, you do look a brute!" said Margery. "I'm not going to stop in the room with that, nor are you, because you are coming for a little walk till lunch-time. You have to see Hooper about mending that gate down to the rocks, and tell him, when he marks out the tennis-court, he must do it according to measurement, and not as his own exuberant fancy prompts. It's about a hundred feet long. Come away out."
Frank turned from the easel.
"Yes, I'll come," he said. "I can't get on with that just now; I don't know why; but unless I paint it as I see it I can't paint it at all, and I see it like that."
"Well, nobody can say you've flattered yourself," said Margery, consolingly.
They strolled out through the sweet-smelling woods, full of scents after the night's rain, and already beginning to turn gold and russet. A light mist still hung over the edges of the estuary, and five miles away, at Falmouth Harbor, the tall masts of the ships seemed to prick the skein of vapor like needles. The tide was up, and covered more than half of the little iron steps below the gate which had to be repaired, and long, brown-fingered sea-weed swung to and fro in the gentle swell of the water, like the hands of some blind man groping upward for light. Color, air, and sound alike seemed subdued and mellow, and with Margery by him Frank's phantoms seemed to catch something of the prevailing tranquillity, and retired into the dim, aqueous mists, instead of hovering insistently round him, black-winged, scarlet-robed.
"I think I'll come to the Fortescues', after all, this afternoon," said Frank, as they turned homeward.
"Why, of course you will."