Lawrence Newt was silent. After a few moments Arthur Merlin rose and shook his hand.
“Good-by!” he said. “We shall meet to-night.”
CHAPTER LXXVIII. — FINISHING PICTURES.
Arthur Merlin returned to his studio and carefully locked the door. Then he opened a huge port-folio, which was full of sketches—and they were all of the same subject, treated in a hundred ways—they were all Hope Wayne.
Sometimes it was a lady leaning from an oriel window in a medieval tower, listening in the moonlight, with love in her eyes and attitude, to the music of a guitar, touched by a gallant knight below, who looked as Arthur Merlin would have looked had Arthur Merlin been a gallant medieval knight.
Then it was Juliet, pale and unconscious in the tomb; superb in snow-white drapery; pure as an angel, lovely as a woman; but it was Hope Wayne still—and Romeo stole frightened in, but Romeo was Arthur.
Or it was Beatrice moving in a radiant heaven; while far below, kneeling, and with clasped hands, gazing upward, the melancholy Dante watched the vision.
Or the fair phantom of Goethe’s ballad looked out with humid, passionate glances between the clustering reeds she pushed aside, and lured the fisherman with love.