“A beautiful thing, Gerry,” he said, “and well chosen. Some poet jeweler dreamed that twining design, and set the stones while the dew was still on the grass.”
After dinner the four gathered in the library, but they were hardly seated when Alix sprang up. Her glance had followed Gerry’s startled gaze. He was staring at the coveted picture he had been looking at in the gallery that afternoon. It hung in the niche in which his thoughts had placed it. Alix took her stand before it. She glanced inquiringly at the others. Mrs. Lansing nodded at the judge. Alix turned back to the picture, and gravity stole into her face. Then she faced the judge with a smile.
“We live,” she said, “in a Philistine age, don’t we? But I’ve never let my Philistinism drive pictures from their right place in the heart. Pictures in art galleries—” she shrugged her pretty shoulders—“I have not been trained up to them. To me they are mounted butterflies in a museum, cut flowers crowded at the florist’s. But this picture and that nook—they have waited for each other. You see the picture nestling down for a long rest, and it seems a small thing, and then it catches your eye and holds it, and you see that it is a little door that opens on a wide world. It has slipped into the room and become a part of life.”
A strange stillness followed Alix’s words. To the judge and to Gerry it was as though the picture had opened a window to her mind. Then she closed the window.
“Come, Gerry,” she said, turning, “make your bow to the judge and bark.”
Gerry was excited, though he did not show it.
“You have dressed my thoughts in words I can’t equal,” he said, and strolled out to the little veranda at the back of the house. He wanted to be alone for a moment and think over this flash of light that had followed a dark day. For the first time in a long while Alix had revealed herself. He did not begrudge the judge his triumph. He knew instinctively that coming from him instead of from the judge the picture would not have struck that intimate spark.
The next day Gerry gave his consent to Alix’s plan for a flying trip abroad, but with a reservation. The reservation was that she should leave him behind.
Judge Healey heard of this arrangement only when it was on the point of being put into effect. In fact, he was only just in time at the steamer to wave good-by to Alix. Leaning over the rail, with her high color, moist red lips, and excited big eyes making play under a golden crown of hair and over a huge armful of roses, Alix presented a picture not easily forgotten.
The judge turned to Gerry.