“I beg your ladyship’s pardon,” said Dale, looking wonderingly, and with all an artist’s admiration for the beautiful in nature, at the glowing beauty of the woman whose eyes were turned with a soft appealing look in his, while the parted lips curved into a smile which revealed her purely white teeth.
“I forgive you,” she said softly, as she held out her hand—“now that you have come.”
Armstrong Dale’s action was the most natural in the world. He was in London, and it was two years since he left Boston to increase his knowledge of the world of art. He took the hand held out to him, and for the moment was fascinated by the spell of the eyes which looked so strangely deep down into his own. Then he was conscious of the soft white hand clinging tightly to his with a pressure to which it had been a stranger since he left the States.
Chapter Four.
An Unexpected Scene.
Armstrong Dale walked up and down his grim-looking, soot-smudged studio, as if he had determined to wear a track on one side similar to that made by a wild beast in his cage.
“I won’t go again,” he said; “it’s a kind of madness. Heavens! how beautiful she is! And that man—that wretched, effete, miserable little piece of conceit, with his insolent criticisms of my work. I felt as if I could strangle him. If it had not been for her appealing looks, I should have had a row with him before now. I will not put up with it. But how she seems to hate him; how she—”
“Bah! Brute! Idiot! Ass! Conceited fool! Because nature has given you a decent face, can’t a handsome woman look at you without your thinking she admires you—can’t she speak gently, and in her graceful refined way, without your thinking that she is in love with you?”