III.
SUNDAY came; and with it a warm sun, a blue sky, a soft, southerly breeze. It was one of those days, peculiar to our climate, which, though they may fall in the middle of winter, bear the fragrance of April upon their breath, and resuscitate for a moment in one's heart all the keen emotions dead since last spring-time. Elias presented himself at the Redwood house shortly after nine o'clock. Christine smiled upon him, and gave him a warm little hand to press. Her father asked, “How about costume? Want her to make up?” Elias said, “Oh, no; what she has on is perfect.” That was a simple gown of some dark blue stuff, confined at the waist by a broad band of cardinal ribbon. Her golden hair was caught in a loose knot behind her ears. Elias set up his easel in the parlor. Then he began the process of posing the model. This called for nice discrimination, and was productive of much mirthful debate. At last it was finished.
“Now,” said old Redwood, “this is altogether too fine a day for me to spend cooped up in the house. I'll leave you two young folks to take care of each other. I'm going to read my newspaper in the park. Sunday don't come more than once a week, you understand. By-by, Chris. So long, Mr. Bacharach.”
He went off.
For a while Elias worked in silence. So great was the pleasure that he got from studying this young girl's beauty, and endeavoring to transfer the elements of it to his canvas, that he never thought of how heavily the time might lag for her. But all at once it occurred to him.
“Why,” he reflected, “I'm treating her for all the world as if she were a paid model. This won't do. I must try to amuse her.”
Then he sought high and low for something to say, something that would be at once appropriate and entertaining. In vain. His wits seemed to have deserted him, his mind to have become a total and hopeless blank. In order readily and happily to manufacture polite conversation, one must have had experience. Elias had had none. Now, in despair, he saw himself reduced to taking refuge in the weather.
“This—er—has been an unusually mild fall, Miss Redwood,” he ventured.
“Yes, very,” she acquiesced.
“But the summer—that was a scorcher, wasn't it?”