"I am glad you like my new dress," returned Olivia, simply. "My husband chose it for me, he has such good taste."
"You need not tell me that, Mrs. Luttrell." And again Olivia blushed like a girl at the implied compliment.
Mr. Gaythorne was looking over a portfolio of water-colour paintings. Olivia had not yet seen them, and she was full of outspoken admiration, as Mr. Gaythorne placed one after another before her.
"They are all the work of a young artist who died at Rome," he said. "I bought them of his widow. They are very well done; he had great promise, poor fellow. If he had lived, he would have done good work. These were merely pot-boilers, as he called them—little things he painted on the spur of the moment."
"To me they are perfectly beautiful," returned Olivia. "Those two are so lovely that I could not choose between them. Please let me look at them a little longer, Mr. Gaythorne, I want to tell Aunt Madge about them." And Olivia, who was always charmingly natural in her movements, propped her chin on her hands, and looked long and earnestly at the pictures.
Their beauty lay in the soft rich colouring and a certain suggestiveness in the subject.
One was a little grey church on a hill-side; the church was ruinous and out of repair, the churchyard full of weeds and thistles; a storm had just broken, and an old shepherd in a ragged smock had taken refuge in the porch, his rough-looking dog at his feet. The bowed figure and knotted hands, and the peaceful look in the wrinkled face were wonderfully striking, the patient eyes turned upwards were gazing at the rainbow. "'Tis a love token, I reckon," were the words written underneath the sketch.
Olivia could almost hear them through the parted lips; ruins and thistles and weeds and a broken storm, and beyond them the message of peace, written on the bright tints of the rainbow, for one simple heart to read.
"Aunt Madge would understand that," she said to herself; "she would like that picture best, but this is just as beautiful to my mind."
The second sketch was equally suggestive; it was a cornfield with poppies growing in it; under the hedge in the cool shade lay a brown baby asleep. A dish tied up in a blue handkerchief and a stone bottle lay beside the infant; an old terrier kept watch over them both.