All those sketches that you saw were but studies for a more serious attempt to catch and fix her personality. (Comment by C. K.: Couldn’t he have given me in two words her height and approximate weight?) I did it in pastel, and, if I missed something of her tender and changeful coloring, I at least caught the ineffable wistfulness of her expression, the look of one hoping against hope for an unconfessed happiness. Probably I had put more of myself into it than I had meant. A man is likely to when he paints with his heart as well as his brain and hand. When it was done I made a little frame for it, and lettered on the frame this line:
“And her eyes dreamed against a distant goal.”
It was the next day that she read the line. I saw the color die from her face and flood back again.
“Why did you set that line there?” she breathed, her eyes fixed on me with a strange expression. (Comment by C. K.: Rossetti again. The dead woman of the beach quoted “The House of Life,” also.)
“Why not?” I asked. “It seems to express something in you which I have tried to embody in the picture. Don’t you like it?”
She repeated the line softly, making pure music of it. “I love it,” she said.
At that, I spoke as it is given to a man to speak to one woman in the world when he has found her. She listened, with her eyes on the pictured face. But when I said to her, “You, who have all my heart, and whose name, even, I have not—is there no word for me,” she rose, and threw out her hands in a gesture that sent a chill through me.
“Oh, no! No!” she cried vehemently. “Nothing—except good-by. Oh, why did you speak?”
I stood and watched her go. At the end of the garden walk she stooped and picked a rose with her gloved fingers, and as she disappeared in the thicket at the top of the hill I thought she half turned to look. That was five interminable days ago. I have not seen her since. I feel it is her will that I shall never see her again. And I must! You understand, Kent, you must find her!
I forgot to tell you that when I was sketching her I asked if she could bring something pink to wear, preferably coral. She came the next time with a string of the most beautiful rose-topazes I have ever seen, set in a most curious old gold design. It was that necklace and none other that the woman with the bundle wore, half concealed, when she came here.