She has taken off her hat, and now passes her handkerchief over her damp forehead.
"I shall be all right when I have once begun, but it is bad to make a start."
"Do not make it! do not tell me! I adjure you not to tell me! it hurts you too much!"
"It would hurt me more to let you go without telling you. Do you remember"—rushing desperately into her subject—"at the time you stayed with us at the Moat, that there was a great talk among us of my having my portrait painted?"
He knits his brow in an eager straining of his memory.
"Yes, I recollect."
"Father was wonderfully proud of me in those days; it seems impossible to believe it now"—with a passing look of incredulity at her own statement—"but he was."
"Yes, yes."
"Do you remember all the arranging and planning as to who was to be the artist, and that he was to come and stay in the house to paint it?"
Jim has put his hand up to his forehead as if to quicken the return of those faint and distant impressions which are coming out in stronger and stronger colours on memory's surface.