“No, I am not offended,” she said; “but I’m afraid I appeared very foolish that day to offer you a tress of my yellow hair.”
“Have I made the picture appear so?” he asked, quickly.
“No; you have made it altogether too beautiful,” she answered, earnestly, and then was covered with confusion at having admitted so much.
“Thank you,” he said, brightly, his face clearing. “I could not do that, if I had spent twice the time I did upon it, and”—bending nearer to her, and speaking in a tender tone—“it is a picture that I painted for myself alone; no one has ever seen it before, and I shall always keep it.”
He covered it carefully with the cloth again as he ceased speaking.
“These are not nearly all my work,” he said, as she turned to look at some others; “they are the united work of an old artist, ‘our master,’ we call him, and of three of my friends—companion artists. We have been traveling together during the last ten months, and these pictures are some of the results of our pilgrimage. We are to return now in a couple of months, having spent our year in America both pleasantly and profitably, I trust. We had to make our headquarters somewhere, so we took this room as a sort of studio, and thus putting our work all together, we manage to make quite a respectable display.”
“I am glad to have seen these pictures,” Star said, “and to know they are all the work of my countrymen. I wish, however, that I was going back to England in a month or two,” she concluded, with a sigh, and a tear springing to her eye.
“Do you?” her companion asked, eagerly. “Then you have not become weaned from your native land?”
“No, indeed,” she said, earnestly. “I love it as dearly as ever, and if I live I shall go back some day to my home.”
The young man bent toward her, an eager light in his eye; his lips parted as if he were about to speak, but Mr. Rosevelt, from the opposite side of the room, suddenly addressed some remark to him, and he was obliged to turn his attention to him.