"Oh—well—of course I hope so—some day," he answered, smiling and hesitating. "But the truth is I got them for you."
Beth did not thank him, but he was too engrossed with his own portraits to notice the omission. She was interested in them, too, when at last he let her look at them.
"What do you think of that?" he asked, showing her a good likeness of himself as she remembered him. "I was a pretty boy then, I think, with my curls! Burning the midnight oil had not bared my forehead in those days, and my beard had not grown. Life was all poetry then!" he sighed affectedly. What had once been spontaneous feeling in him had become a mere recollection, only to be called up by an effort.
"Later it became all excesses, I suppose," said Beth.
"Ah!" he ejaculated in a tone of pleased regret. "I had to live like other men of my standing, you know, and I had to pay for it. The boy was lost, but the man developed. You may think the change a falling off——"
He waited for Beth to express an opinion; but as it was impossible for her to say what she thought of the difference between the conceited, dissipated-looking, hysterical man of many meannesses, and the diffident unspoilt promising boy, she held her peace.
When she had seen the photographs, and he had looked at them himself to his heart's content, he did them up again, and then formally presented her with the packet. "Will you keep them?" he said solemnly.
"Oh no!" she answered with decision. "I am not the proper person to keep them. If they did not belong to your mother, they would be for your wife and children."
"Ah, my wife!" he ejaculated bitterly. "I haven't a word to say against my wife, remember that! Only—you are the one to whom I would confide them."
"I decline the responsibility," Beth said, keeping her countenance with difficulty.