For the moment he was filled, as he often was, with a sense of passionate admiration. It was true he saw her as no other creature had ever seen her before, that so far as such a thing was possible with her, she loved him—loved him with a fierce, unreserved, yet narrow passion.
He had little actual packing to do—merely the collecting of a few masculine odds and ends, and then his artistic accompaniments. Nothing was of consequence but these; the rest were tossed together indifferently, but the picture was to be left until the last moment, that its paint might be dry beyond a doubt.
Having completed his preparations he went out. He had the day before him, and scarcely knew what to do with it, but it must be killed in one way or another. He wandered up the mountain and at last lay down with his cigar among the laurels. He was full of a strange excitement which now thrilled, now annoyed him.
He came back in the middle of the afternoon and laughed a rather half-hearted laugh at the excellent Mandy's comment upon his jaded appearance.
“Ye look kinder tuckered out,” she said. “Ye'd oughtn't ter walked so fur when ye was a-gwine off to-night. Ye'd orter rested.”
She stopped the churn-dasher and regarded him with a good-natured air of interest.
“Hev ye seed Dusk to say good-by to her?” she added. “She's went over the mountain ter help Mirandy Stillins with her soap. She wont be back fur a day or two.”
He went into his room and shut the door. A fierce repulsion sickened him. He had heretofore held himself with a certain degree of inward loftiness; he had so condemned the follies and sins of other men, and here he found himself involved in a low and common villainy, in the deceits which belonged to his crime, and which preyed upon simplicity and ignorant trust.
He went and stood before his easel, hot with a blush of self-scorn.
“Has it come to this?” he muttered through his clinched teeth—“to this!”