“Love shackled with Vain-longing, hand to hand,”
but, even as her ravishing lips spoke golden words of praise, his vain longing to kiss them admonished him how feebly his symbols expressed the heart-sickness he was feeling. The longer he heard the music of her lauding voice, the more those gray eyes kindled below the pink bonnet in adoration of his genius, the more his disgust with the picture grew; and when a chance word of hers reminded him that the subject had already been treated in the last Academy, he determined to destroy his work the moment she was gone, though he had always been aware of the little skied picture which had drawn Miss Regan’s eccentric attention. The last vestiges of his hope of her love died as she discussed “Love’s Fatality,” with apparent unconsciousness that to him, at least, the picture stood for something personal; her aloofness was exacerbating. The heats of his fever died; only the chill was left.
He gave her some tea, and became gradually aware that she was abnormally loquacious and vivacious. He remembered to ask after Miss Regan’s health, and was told that Olive was bright and gay, with only rare reactions of pessimism. Mrs. Wyndwood wondered dolefully again what she would do when Olive was married. His heart, bolder than his lips, beat “Come to me. Come to me.” But she did not seem to catch its appeal, though his eyes spoke, too. In his embarrassment he turned over the pages of the dainty little book she had laid down on the table. He started at finding it a new volume of Harold Lavender’s poems, and when on the fly-leaf he read “To Eleanor” his face twitched noticeably.
“Ah, that was the book Mr. Lavender wrote about in the letter that Primitiva lost,” she said, quickly. “It’s just out to-day.”
“I see he calls you Eleanor,” he observed, tonelessly.
“Yes,” she responded, smiling, “that is a poetic license. Besides, it is a screen. There are so many Eleanors.”
That sounded true to his bitter mood. There were indeed so many Eleanors, all in contradiction. He kept turning over the leaves in silent jealousy.
“Ah, that is a very pretty one you have there,” she said, lightly. “It might suggest a subject to you. Read it aloud, it’s only ten lines.”
Fuming inwardly at the suggestion that the dapper poet of sugar-plums and the hero of the nougat, whom he mentally classed with Roy as an interloper, could afford him any inspiration, and further incensed by the command to read the fellow’s verses, he gabbled through the little poem, which extended over two deckle-edged, rough, creamy pages.
“ROSALIND READING AN OLD ROMANCE