“Sometimes I can’t but hope that it is concern of mind, without his knowing it.”
Mrs. Toxer also knitted, and scratched, and counted.
“No, ma’am; much more likely concern of heart with a full consciousness of it. One, two, three—bless my soul! I’m always dropping a stitch.”
Aunt Winnifred, who never dropped stitches, smiled pleasantly, and answered,
“Yes, indeed, and this time you have dropped a very great one.”
Meanwhile Arthur’s great picture advanced rapidly. Diana, who had looked only like a portrait of Hope Wayne looking out of a cloud, was now more fully completed. She was still bending from the clouds indeed, but there was more and more human softness in the face every time he touched it. And lo! he had found at last Endymion. He lay upon a grassy knoll. Long whispering tufts sighed around his head, which rested upon the very summit of the mountain. There were no trees, no rocks. There was nothing but the sleeping figure with the shepherd’s crook by his side upon the mountain top, all lying bare to the sky and to the eyes that looked from the cloud, and from which all the moonlight of the picture fell.
When Lawrence Newt came into the studio one morning, Arthur, who worked in secret upon his picture and never showed it, asked him if he would like to look at it. The merchant said yes, and seated himself comfortably in a large chair, while the artist brought the canvas from an inner room and placed it before him. As he did so, Arthur stepped a little aside, and watched him closely.
Lawrence Newt gazed for a long time and silently at the picture. As he did so, his face rapidly donned its armor of inscrutability, and Arthur’s eyes attacked it in vain. Diana was clearly Hope Wayne. That he had seen from the beginning. But Endymion was as clearly Lawrence Newt! He looked steadily without turning his eyes, and after many minutes he said, quietly,
“It is beautiful. It is triumphant. Endymion is a trifle too old, perhaps. But Diana’s face is so noble, and her glance so tenderly earnest, that it would surely rouse him if he were not dead.”
“Dead!” returned Arthur; “why you know he is only sleeping.”