"Fancies—mere fancies!" she interrupted. "Mine is not an unusual type of face in England."
"A most unusual type, I call it," he rejoined, earnestly, "and one that I am longing to commit to paper. My body, you must know, Miss Grahame, sits before a desk in a bank all day, but in my mind I am forever drawing and painting, committing lovely scenes and lovely faces very inadequately to canvas."
"I remember," she said, in constrained tones, "that you first met Miss Cavan in a picture-gallery."
"And I remember," he returned, composedly, "how like I thought her to a Paris Bordone. Miss Cavan's colouring is very fine, and there is altogether a Venetian opulence about her appearance. If you are at all interested in pictures, you will see some very good ones when you come, as I hope you will, with Mrs. Vandeleur to my uncle's house next week to tea."
"Thank you," she said, trying vainly to adopt an indifferent 'society' tone. "I am unfortunately engaged that day."
"But no day was fixed," he cried; "and it must be a day on which you are not engaged! I am most anxious that you should know my uncle. You must, I think, be quite his ideal."
"How can you possibly know," she asked, "what my character may be? You forget, Mr. Armstrong, that you know absolutely nothing about me."
"It seems impossible," he said, thoughtfully, "and yet I suppose it is true, as facts go, and that I must have seen that face so like yours, with floating hair, in my dreams. But facts are the least important things in this world, Miss Grahame. It is only by reading between the lines of the facts of his life that we really know any man. A bare summary of events teaches us nothing. We live outside, or, rather, inside of what happens to us."
"Now you are talking like Mrs. Vandeleur," said Laline, interested in spite of herself.
"But don't you agree with me? Here are you and I, as far apart as two fixed stars, each within a little world wherein the other cannot hope to tread, except, perhaps, sometimes in dreams. To show you how little value facts have—I met you, as you say, a week ago for the first time; you just spoke a few words, telling me Mrs. Vandeleur was out and would soon return. I spoke to you; I don't know what I talked about, for I was feeling your presence too deeply to be coherent even before I saw your face; then a light was brought, and I learned your features by heart, every turn of every line of them, before you left the room. And, as I went out of the house, fully an hour later, I saw your face again, pressed against the window, watching me with something in your eyes that looked like dislike and fear. To-day I meet you for the second time, and you speak to me with coldness and dislike in every note of your voice. All that is not much to go upon—is it?"