She did not look at him; but he was studying her face, which was still rounded in girlish lines. She was wonderfully fair, of the type distinguished by close texture of skin and faintest colour beneath,—the merest hint of colour, subdued, half-revealed, vague, like the pink shadow in white roses. Her eyes at once arrested and held his attention. They were blue—the indefinable blue of sun-flooded mid-sea—and her dark head had not prepared him for this. She looked at him gravely once, but, with the portrait still in her eyes, only half seeing him. The dejection of the young aspirant who gazes upon an achievement he feels to be immeasurably beyond his own powers was written upon her face. Wayne had expected that she would show embarrassment when he revealed himself, but her indifference piqued him. Here, clearly, was no subject for easy conquest. She seemed sincerely interested in the beautiful painting before which they stood, and perhaps, after all, she was not the usual paint-smearing trifler, but a serious student. She spoke further of the portrait, and he had now a half-amused sense that she was speaking to herself rather than to him. He was, in a way, a lay figure, to be suffered for a moment as though he were as wooden as the bench from which he had risen.
“I was trying to copy the hand—the fifth time to-day—and I simply can’t do it. As it rests on the arm of the chair—there—it is perfectly natural; but I can’t get it; I simply can’t.”
She uncrumpled her sketch and glanced at it again; then with fresh disdain she shut her hand upon it. Her pencil dropped and he picked it up. The point was broken. She put out her hand for it but he looked at it ruefully.
“If you can wait a moment I will sharpen it for you.”
“No, thank you. I must get my things and go.”
“But to leave the gallery with a spoiled sketch and a broken point to your pencil would be most unfortunate. If you will hold the paper to catch the shavings I’ll sharpen it in a jiffy. Then you can go away armed for another day’s attack. To retreat now, discouraged, with a pointless pencil would never do in the world.”
He laughed his pleasure in the encounter. She carried her dark head a little high; and now that he looked directly into her eyes there hovered in them the faintest hint of gray that further strengthened the suggestion of the sea.
“I am not the least superstitious,” she said.
“But I am! As a friend of art I could not think of allowing you to leave with a broken pencil. Something would undoubtedly happen to you on the way home.”
He had caught her attention; his manner was half mocking, half serious; and he drew out his knife to prolong the interview. Flattery spoke in his words and manner: Wayne Craighill was not ignorant of the way of a man with a maid. The girl held the paper while he sharpened the pencil deliberately, and she took careful note of him and his belongings.