What was it that made me take an interest so strange, strong, and sudden in this man? Without a hint of hair upon his face, while juvenile curls clustered thick and short beneath his wide-awake, he had at first struck me as being not much more than a lad, till, as he gave me that rapid, searching glance in passing, I perceived the little crow's-feet round his eyes, and he then struck me immediately as being probably on the verge of thirty-five. His figure was slim and thin, his waist almost girlish in its fall. I should have considered him small had not the unusually deep, loud, manly, and sonorous voice with which he had accosted Sinfi conveyed an impression of size and weight such as even big men do not often produce. This deep voice, coupled with that gaunt kind of cheek which we associate with the most demure people, produced an effect of sedateness such as I should have expected to find (and did not find) in the other man—the man of the shaven cheek and Quaker costume; but, in the one glance I had got from those watchful, sagacious, twinkling eyes, there was an expression quite peculiar to them, quite inscrutable, quite indescribable.
II
'Can you reckon him up, brother?' said Sinfi, taking my meerschaum from my lips to refill it for me, as she was fond of doing.
'No.'
'Nor I nuther,' said Sinfi. 'Nor I can't pen his dukkerin' nuther, though often's the time I've tried it.'
During this time the two friends seemed to have finished their colloquy upon 'composition'; for they both came up to us. Sinfi rose; I sat still on the grass, smoking my pipe, listening to the chatter of the water as it rushed over the rocks. By this time my curiosity in the younger man had died away. My mind was occupied with the dream-picture of a little blue-eyed girl struggling with a wounded heron. I had noticed, however, that he of the piercing eyes did not look at me again, having entirely exhausted at a glance such interest as I had momentarily afforded him; while his companion seemed quite unconscious of my presence as he stood there, his large, full, deep, brown eyes gazing apparently at something over my head, a long way off. Also I had noticed that 'Visionary' was stamped upon this man's every feature—that he seemed an inspired baby of forty, talking there to his companion and to Sinfi, the sun falling upon his long, brown, curly hair, mixed with grey, which fell from beneath his hat, and floated around his collar like a mane.
When my reverie had passed, I found the artists trying to arrange with Sinfi to give an open-air sitting to one of them, the man addressed as Wilderspin. Sinfi seemed willing enough to come to terms; but I saw her look round at me as if saying to herself, 'What am I to do with you?'
'I should like for my brother to sit too,' I heard her say.
'Surely!' said Wilderspin. 'Your brother would be a great gain to my picture.'
Sinfi then came to me, and said that the painter wanted me to sit to him.