Bridget flushed a little.
“I’m so anxious for your book to come out, Mr. Carey,” she said, rather hastily. “Everything you write has the sunshine lying right across it,—real hot sunshine! I like the way you have of bringing Eastern scenes before one’s mind by a single word, sometimes. I always think, if you hadn’t written you would have painted; you would have been a great colorist,” she added, with the quick, pretty smile which always conveyed to Carey a sense of flattery more subtle than her frank words.
“Well, my poor old grandfather, at any rate, would have blessed you for that remark. He brought me up, you know; he was a painter himself. It was a great blow to the dear old boy that I didn’t take to his trade. That reminds me,” he added suddenly, putting his cup down, and looking across curiously at Bridget. “I’ve been haunted ever since I knew you by your likeness to some one. You know what a tantalizing, maddening thing a likeness you can’t fix is. Now I know! You are exactly like a sketch of his—one he made when he was a young man, somewhere in the north of Ireland. It’s the head of a girl—”
“A fisher girl?” Bridget cried, eagerly. She rose and went to a writing-table. “Not this? I brought it down to show Helen yesterday,” she said, coming towards him. She put the sketch into his hands.
Carey half rose from his seat. “Bridget O’Hea! This is his writing—this is the Bridget he mentioned once. Who is she?” he demanded.
“My grandmother,” she answered, smiling. “She was just a fisher girl at Dara’s Bay in Galway.”
Their eyes met. “My grandfather said she was the loyalest and best, as well as the loveliest woman in Ireland,” he returned. “You are like her. Very like her,” he added, glancing from the sketch to Bridget.
“Thank you!” Her color rose a little; her face wore a softened, grateful look. “I’m glad to hear that, though I don’t remember her,” she said. “I have always been interested in this grandmother of mine.”
Carey leant back in his chair, and gazed musingly at the sketch. “How strange!” he said. “There was a romance, you know,” he went on slowly, after a moment. “My grandfather loved her—he never forgot her, I believe.”
“And she?” Bridget asked, breathlessly, with parted lips.