"Let us go in," she urged ere long; "I'm cold."
"Cold now, perhaps," murmured Morris softly, "but, if I mistake not, magnificently capable of burning with the most divine of all fires."
She made no answer. He could not be sure that she had heard, or if she had, that she understood. Neither was he at all sure that the time had even yet come when it was really desirable that she should hear and understand.
CHAPTER V
THE WILES OF THE FOWLER
Within a week of taking up her residence at "Mon Bijou," Evarne started her career at Florelli's. She proved very painstaking, and earnest—so much so as to cause considerable surprise to the other students, who had judged, from the luxury of her attire and appointments, that she was a mere dilettante.
She was far and away the most elementary pupil in the studio, and truth to tell did not find it particularly interesting to sit alone hour after hour in a corner, covering reams of Michallet, and using up boxes of charcoal in repeated struggles to depict gigantic plaster replicas of detached features from Michael Angelo's "David," or innumerable casts of torsos, of arms and legs, hands and feet, in all sizes and attitudes—painfully suggestive of amputations.
For stimulus and encouragement she would peep into the two rooms where the more advanced students were working from life, in one room from the costume model, in the other from the nude. The mental atmosphere of these rooms was so full of energy and enthusiasm that she would return with fresh ardour to her limbs and features.
Not that she was able to devote all her time to the services of the exigent Muses, nor, alas! could this pursuit arouse the keenest, most engrossing thoughts and energies of which her nature was capable. Interest in this, as in everything else in the wide universe, showed pallid and feeble before the overwhelming and concentrated interest of her love for Morris Kenyon. There was something almost tragic in such a domination. Barely seventeen, her heart and mind should have been still too youthful, too immature, to conceive and sustain such force of emotion.