“I’m not so beautiful as that,” she had said to Adam with a deprecatory tone in her voice, as the two stood before it. “It’s only because you think I am, and because you’ve kept on saying it over and over until you believe it. It’s the gown and the peach blossoms in the jar behind my chair—not me.”
The servants were none the less enthusiastic. Bundy screwed up his toad eyes and expressed the opinion that it was “de ’spress image,” and fat old Aunt Dinah, who had stumbled up the garret stairs from the kitchen, the first time in years—her quarters being on the ground floor of one of the cabins—put on her spectacles, and lifting up her hands, exclaimed in a camp-meeting voice:
“De Lawd wouldn’t know t’other from which if both on ye went to heaben dis minute! Dat’s you, sho’ nuff, young mist’ess.”
Only one thing troubled the young painter: What would the Judge say when he returned in the morning? What alterations would he insist upon? He had been compelled so many times to ruin a successful picture, just to please the taste of the inexperienced, that he trembled lest this, the best work of his brush, should share their fate. Should the Judge disapprove Olivia’s heart would well nigh be broken, for she loved the picture as much as he did himself.
The night before Judge Colton’s return the two sat out on the porch in the moonlight. The air was soft and full of the coming summer. Fire-flies darted about; the croaking of tree-toads could be heard. From the quarters of the negroes came the refrain of an old song:
“Corn top’s ripe and de meadow’s in de bloom,
“Weep no mo’ me lady.”
“I feel as if I had been dreaming and had just waked up,” sighed Olivia. “Is it all over?”
“Yes, I can’t make it any better,” he answered in a positive tone, his thoughts on his picture.