Resolved to settle this point to her own satisfaction so soon as an opportunity should arise, Clare followed the others into the studio, and affected great admiration of Wallace's sketches, which were in truth far too fanciful and unconventional to arouse her interest.
"This is where my heart is," he said to Laline on her first introduction to the studio; "or, rather"—glancing quickly round and perceiving that Clare had not yet joined them—"this is where it was."
Laline glanced at him coldly and turned to examine some drawings. Nothing, she told herself, should ever induce her to forgive him; but his pictures interested her, and especially a pencil sketch, as yet uncompleted, of extreme delicacy and beauty, entitled "Evelyn Hope."
The figure of the dead girl, exquisitely youthful and pure in outline, lay stretched upon the bed, touched and glorified by two long rays of light that stole through the hinges of the close shutters. A dark-haired young man sat, with face averted from the spectator, gazing intently at the still white figure, into whose hand he was gently thrusting a single geranium leaf.
"'So hush—I will give you this leaf to keep!
See—I shut it inside the sweet cold hand!
There—that is our secret; go to sleep.
You will wake and remember and understand.'"
Wallace came behind Laline as she stood before the easel examining the picture, and softly quoted Browning's lines, which she had never heard before, and which touched her with a keen delight.
"I should like to read you the entire poem," he said.
"But who did you take for your heroine—I mean, who sat for it?"
"No one. It was a memory. I did it on my return from that walk in Kensington Gardens."
He spoke very low, so as not to be heard by Clare, who was at the farther end of the room turning over some sketches in a portfolio against the wall. Laline had already recognised her own profile in "Evelyn Hope," and was not ill-pleased by the dreamy loveliness which characterised the drawing.