“I could pray more fervently in a church like that than in the Madeleine,” she replied in a soft, silvery voice.
“The Madeleine is too rowy, too many chairs creaking, too many swells, and all that sort of thing, you know.”
Insensibly the drawl of society had come upon him, and the slanginess of expression which passes current in Mayfair and Belgravia.
“Miss Jyvecote is going to brighten me up, Mr. Brown; she is going to work me an altar-cloth,” exclaimed the delighted priest.
“And I am going to paint you an altar-picture, a copy of Raphael’s Virgin and Child—that is, if you will kindly accept it,” he added, blushing to the roots of his hair.
“Oh! how charming, how generous,” cried Miss Jyvecote.
“My dear Mr. Brown,” said Father Maurice, crossing the room and taking his guest by the hand, “I am deeply, deeply sensible of the kindly, the noble spirit which actuates you to make this offer; but you are a young man, with a grand future before you, with God’s help, and by and by, when you have leisure, perhaps you will get a stiff letter from me calling on you to fulfil your promise. You’ll find me a very tough customer to deal with, I assure you.”
“He thinks I cannot afford it,” said Brown to himself; “and how delicately he has refused me!”
The entrance of Mrs. Clancy with a smoking dish of salmon cutlets turned the tide of the conversation, and in a few moments the artist found himself with Miss Jyvecote discussing the Royal Academy pictures of the last season, glorifying Millais, extolling Holman Hunt, raving over Leslie and Herbert, and ringing the changes over the pearly grays, changeful opals, amaranths, and primrose of Leighton. From London to the salon is easy transition, and from thence to the galleries of Dresden, Munich, and Florence. She had visited all, and to a purpose. He had lingered within their enchanting walls until every canvas became more or less a friend. There was a wonderful charm in this meeting. To Brown Miss Jyvecote was a listener freshly intelligent, naïvely sensible. To her the clever critiques of this high-bred yet humble artist savored of a romance written but unreal. It is scarcely necessary to say that when people drop thus upon a subject so charming, so inexhaustible, so refreshing the old Scytheman is utterly disregarded, and the sun was already sinking towards the west when Miss Jyvecote’s phaeton came to the gate.
“Have you any of your sketches here, Mr. Brown?” she asked, as she drew on her yellow dogskin driving-gloves.