"Going away!" echoed Angela, "Where?"
"To Naples," he answered, "Only for a little while. They have purchased my picture 'Phillida et les Roses' for one of the museums there, and they want me to see if I approve of the position in which it is to be placed. They also wish to honour me by a banquet or something of the kind—an absurdly unnecessary affair, but still I think it is perhaps advisable that I should go."
He spoke with an affectation of indifference, but any observer of him whose eyes were not blinded by affection, could have seen that he exhaled from himself an atmosphere of self-congratulation at the banquet proposition. Little honours impress little minds;—and a faint thrill of pain moved Angela as she saw him thus delighted with so poor and ordinary a compliment. In any other man it would have moved her to contempt, but in Florian—well!—she was only just a little sorry.
"Yes, perhaps it might look churlish of you not to accept," she said, putting away from her the insidious suggestion that perhaps if Florian loved her as much as he professed, an invitation to a banquet at Naples would have had no attraction for him as compared with being present at the first view of her picture on the morning she had herself appointed—"I think under the circumstances you had better not see the picture till you come back!"
"Now, Angela!" he exclaimed vexedly, "You know I will not consent to that! You have promised me that I shall be the first to see it—and here I am!"
"It should be seen by the morning light," said Angela, a touch of nervousness beginning to affect her equanimity,—"This light is pale and waning, though the afternoon is so clear. You cannot see the coloring to the best advantage!"
"Am I not a painter also?" asked Varillo playfully, putting his arm round her waist,—"And can I not guess the effect in the morning light as well as if I saw it? Come, Angela mia! Unveil the great prodigy!" and he laughed,—"You began it before we were affianced;—think what patience I have had for nearly two years!"
Angela did not reply at once. Somehow, his light laugh jarred upon her.
"Florian," she said at last, raising her truthful, beautiful eyes fully to his, "I do not think you quite understand! This picture has absorbed a great deal of my heart and soul—I have as it were, painted my own life blood into it—for I mean it to declare a truth and convey a lesson. It will either cover me with obloquy, or crown me with lasting fame. You speak jestingly, as if it were some toy with which I had amused myself these three years. Do you not believe that a woman's work may be as serious, as earnest, and strongly purposeful as a man's?"
Still clasping her round the waist, Florian drew her closer, and pressing her head against his breast, he looked down on her smiling.