On the Tuesday he found his opportunity. Miss Robinson came alone, explaining that her mother would not appear till the time fixed for the tea-party. The weather was rigorously wintry now, and a biting wind blew in as the door was opened. A new layer of snow had fallen during the last hour, and Miss Robinson had come across wrapped in a big, heavy cloak. He ushered her through the ante-room with a charming air of solicitude, to which she vibrated like a struck harp, and gave him the softest and tenderest intonations of her voice. He helped her off with the cloak, and hung it away carefully, the whilst she stooped and warmed her long hands at the lavishly heaped-up fire. Her throat and arms now showed at their best, and her face had some strange, almost mystic undertone of happiness. As she bent down there before his eyes, she completely blotted out the impression of the insignificant plain woman whom he had suddenly come upon in the streets; of the everyday Miss Robinson that at one time had almost become an obsession. At that moment she was well-nigh the idealised figure he had painted. Yet there was something even subtler in her which he had missed, and knew that he had missed. But, studying his own work again, he saw that that was just as well; for the picture existed as a separate creation, a piece of painting first and foremost, in which he had exhibited the cleverness of his brush. It was paint—distinguished, intellectual paint—more than it was human portraiture; in spite of all the significance with which he had tried to invest it. As this new truth dawned upon him, he kept glancing from sitter to canvas, and from canvas to sitter, with a strange, surprised interest. But her hands suddenly arrested his attention, and he became aware that, for the first time since he had known her, they were absolutely bare of rings.
"You have no rings to-day," he remarked, his voice showing his surprise. "I might have wanted to touch up the hands."
Her colour deepened unaccountably. "I thought the hands were finished," she breathed, all of a flutter. "Shall I go back for them?"
"What a goose it is!" he said lightly, and she smiled again, as if pleased they were on so charmingly intimate a footing.
"Shall we not need them?" she asked.
"I think not," he answered, studying the hands a little. "You were perfectly right; they had best remain as they are."
She took the pose, and for a minute or two he worked silently; she maintaining the perfect stillness that had at first been her cherished ambition. He was still pondering about her bare hands and her confusion at his having observed them, and light came to him. Was it to show him that no man—not even Mr. Shanner—had any claim on her? After the close attentions he had witnessed the other evening, was she afraid he might infer that some understanding existed between herself and Mr. Shanner?—that one of these rings, even if not a formal pledge, might be his and worn for his sake? Her neglect of such favourite trinkets to-day was then to indicate that no one of them had any special sentimental interest for her!
"You are sitting perfectly to-day," he presently remarked. "It doesn't tire you?"
"What an unkind suggestion! I thought I had got beyond the amateur stage long ago."
"I'm sorry. You didn't hear, though, the beginning of my remark."