Suddenly he broke off, and applied himself to his dinner.
Perhaps the face he had called up affected him, after all.
Uncle Robert caught his sister’s eye. She was looking towards him with a certain triumph.
She knew quite well that her brother had been thinking Philip callous, and she was not sorry that a sudden betrayal of feeling on the boy’s part had undeceived his uncle.
“I must begin your portrait to-morrow, Mr. Burns,” Dan said, to fill an awkward silence.
“The sooner the better, my boy!” exclaimed Uncle Robert. “You ought to get my picture in the New Gallery next year, as you did old Lord What’s-his-name’s this year.”
Dan laughed. “I was lucky,” he said.
Phyllis was behaving with great discretion. She certainly looked at Dan a good deal, but none of her glances had the usual coquetry, and Dan, who had also looked at her, never liked her so much as during this hour.
He thought about her as a sort of under-current of contemplation while he talked of other things. He remembered her little coquettish ways of the past, and saw, or fancied he saw, them in a truer, clearer light. She had been sweet to him and made much of him and flattered him because he had been under a cloud. It had not been, as he had then imagined, wilful flirting—wilful flirting which to him had nevertheless been very pleasant at the time.
Now that he was himself, Phyllis had become the demure, modest, even shy maiden, which to him was infinitely more attractive.