The newsagent's clerk, when arranging his wares that morning, had had what he felt to be an unusually bright idea. Picking out what he considered the two most attractive items in the illustrated paper with which he was dealing, he had repeated these items alternately with what to most onlookers would have seemed an irritating regularity.
The two pages he had selected for this honour were very different. The one consisted of a set of photographs, nine officers in uniform: General Hew Lingard and his Staff, just returned home after the victorious Amadawa Expedition. "Here," the bookstall clerk had probably argued unconsciously, and quite wrongly, to himself, "is a page that will interest gentlemen and boys. Now I must find something that will cause ladies to purchase the paper," and he had accordingly put next to the page of military portraits one consisting of a single illustration—the reproduction of a beautiful painting of a beautiful woman.
The man staring up at the black and white pages was true to what the clerk took to be the masculine type of newspaper buyer and reader, for he devoted his whole attention to the group of military portraits. He had, however, a special reason for staring up as he was now doing at the rather absurd dado, for it was his own portrait which occupied the place of honour in the centre of the page.
Being the manner of man he was, Hew Lingard felt at once elated and ashamed at seeing himself hung up in this queer pillory of fame. He was moved more than he would have cared to admit, even to himself, at seeing the honour paid to that old photograph taken some seven years before, at a time when he was out of love with life, having been, as he imagined, shelved by a small home appointment.
The portraits of his staff were comparatively new; they had doubtless been supplied in haste by the happy mothers and sisters of the sitters, and his grey eyes, set under deep overhanging brows, rested on them proudly. It was to these eight comrades—so he would have been the first to admit, nay to insist—that he had owed much of the sudden overwhelming success which had now come to him.
At last he resolutely concentrated his attention on the opposite illustration, and coming up a little closer to the stall, he read what was printed underneath:
"This modern picture, only painted ten years ago, fetched ten thousand pounds at Christie's last week. It is a portrait of the beautiful Mrs. Richard Maule in the character of a Greek nymph. Mrs. Maule, before her marriage to the well-known owner of Rede Place, one of the show places of Surrey, was Miss Athena Durdon. Her father was British Consul at Athens, and her mother a Greek lady of rank; hence her interesting and unusual Christian name."
"Why, it's Jane's friend," he said to himself. "How very odd that I should see it here and now!"
General Lingard had glanced at the illustration, when his eye had first caught sight of it, with distaste. But now that he knew that this rather fantastic picture was a painting of the dearest friend of the woman who was going to be his wife, he looked with kind, considering, and even eager eyes at the Greek nymph.
The famous soldier did not find it easy to adjust his imaginary portrait of Athena Maule, Jane Oglander's Athena, to this lovely embodiment of a pagan myth. But artists, or so he supposed, sometimes times take strange liberties with their sitters—besides, this was not in any sense a portrait....