Fox gave a moment to reflection. “Ah,” he observed, “I recollect, Judge Temple has a daughter. I had never seen her; I’ve heard her spoken of, though, a hundred times; her name is—?”
“Rose Temple.”
William Fox glanced at his companion obliquely and smiled, but he made no attempt at pleasantry. After a little, however, as they approached the residential quarter and neared his club, where he intended to dine, he returned to the subject. “You are painting Miss Temple’s portrait?”
“Yes, attempting it,” assented Allestree, with marked reluctance; he felt it to be almost a sacrilege to speak of a piece of work which had become, in more ways than one, a labor of love.
He was indeed painting Rose Temple’s portrait, for he was already a notable portrait painter, but he was doing it much as Raphael may have painted the Sistine Madonna, with a reverence which was full of ineffable tenderness and inspiration, and he was too keenly aware of Fox’s intimate knowledge of him and his unmerciful insight into human motives to endure the thought of Fox in possession of his inmost secrets and on terms of friendship with Rose. Fox! one of the most enigmatical, the most dangerous, the most fascinating personalities—Allestree had seen the potency of that spell—to be brought in contact with any woman, and most of all with a young and imaginative girl.
After a moment Fox’s laugh interrupted him. “My dear Allestree,” he said provokingly, “why not paint the Angel Gabriel?”
His companion, whose sensitiveness amounted to an exquisite self-torture, bit his lip and made no reply.
At the door of the club they both paused as Allestree prepared to take a car uptown while his cousin went in to dine.
“Sorry you can’t come to us,” he said, in a tone which was a shade less cordial than usual; “mother will be disappointed; there is no one else coming, and she always counts greatly on a talk with you.”
“Give her my love instead,” Fox retorted, with easy kindness, “I’m sorry, but I dine here and then go up to the Whites’. I promised; there’s to be music—or something—to-night.”