She went out and got the brooch. It was a smooth, oval stone of a deep-red color, with a tiny flame flickering in it. The lapidary had been too true an artist to spoil the stone with facets, and the result was a little crystallized poem. Edith laid it on black velvet, and held it out for Carl to see. “There!” she said. It had never occurred to him to look
at it before, but now its beauty was apparent.
“I am delighted to give it to you, dear,” he said affectionately, and pinned the velvet ribbon round her neck with it.
They smiled at each other, well pleased; then she sat down by him, and watched while he began to sketch.
“Isn’t it odd, Carl,” she said, “that you and I should be rich people, when we were so poor a short time ago? Only I did not know that we were poor. I always felt rich after I came here.”
“I half remember a fairy story,” Carl said. “It is of a fairy who wove pearls around a sunbeam, or a moonbeam, to prove to her lover her miraculous power. I am going to paint you as that fairy. Shall it be a sunbeam or a moonbeam, milady?”
“Make it a tropical full moonlight, Carl, and give me a palm-tree to stand under. It would be refreshing to stand in the midst of such a scene, even on canvas.”
The artist sketched lightly and swiftly. “Here, at the right, a troop of fairies shall dance, only half seen. Near them, a thin arch of a waterfall shall leap, and drop, and lose itself in spray, and gather so slowly, and flow away so slowly, that the stream shall look like a vein of amethyst damaskeened into the turf, not a ripple nor a bubble to be seen. The orchestra, blowing on flower-trumpets, and shaking campaniles of bluebells and lilies-of-the-valley, are hidden by their instruments beside this waterfall, and their music makes the thin sheet waver as it drops. The palm-tree lifts itself against the moon, and seems to be on fire with it, and droops in a verdant cascade above you, every feathery plume fire-fringed with light. But only one beam, like a shaft of diamond, shall pierce that
foliage, and there you stand, with your arms uplifted, braiding pearls around it. You are smiling softly, your hair is down, and filmy sleeves drop back to your shoulders. As you braid, the light prisoned inside changes the pearls to opals.”
“You will never be able to make me look like a fairy,” Edith said. “I see a moral in everything. Fairy stories and myths always seem to me Christian truths in masquerade; as though the truths, jealously wishing us to prize them, put on dress after dress, to see if we would recognize them in each. ‘If you really care for me, you will know me through any disguise,’ that is what they say. Why, Carl, if you and I were at a masquerade, and you did not know me, I should feel hurt.”