"Do you mean to tell me, really, that you taught yourself, Mlle. Marmont?" and as he said this, the cold, gray eye lit up with unwonted brilliancy.
"What I say is true," replied the girl, and elevating her own lustrous eyes, they encountered his own, with a glance quite as steady.
"Let us go into the sunlight, and examine the tints more fully;" and leading the way they emerged into the sitting-room where customers were in the habit of awaiting the artist's pleasure.
Here the pictures were again closely scrutinized, but far more accurately than before; and after fully satisfying his curiosity on the score of the originality of the penciling, approached Lucile very closely, and darting his wonderful glance into the depths of her own eyes, said, after a moment's pause, "You have glorious eyes."
Lucile was about to protest, in a hurried way, against such adulation, when he continued: "Nay, nay, do not deny it. Your eyes are the most fathomless orbs that ever I beheld—large, too, and lustrous—the very eyes I have been searching for these five years past. A judge of color; a rare judge of color! How is your father to-day, my child?"
The tone of voice in which this last remark was made had in it more of the curious than the tender. It seemed to have been propounded more as a matter of business than of feeling. Still, Lucile replied respectfully, "Oh! worse, sir; a great deal worse. Doctor White declares that it is impossible for him to recover, and that he cannot live much longer."
"Not live?" replied Pollexfen, "not live?" Then, as if musing, he solemnly added, "When your father is dead, Lucile, come to me, and I will make your fortune. That is, if you follow my advice, and place yourself exclusively under my instructions. Nay, but you shall earn it yourself. See!" he exclaimed, and producing a bank deposit-book from his pocket, "See! here have I seven thousand five hundred dollars in bank, and I would gladly exchange it for one of your eyes."
Astonishment overwhelmed the girl, and she could make no immediate reply; and before she had sufficiently recovered her self-possession to speak, the photographer hastily added, "Don't wonder; farewell, now. Remember what I have said—seven thousand five hundred dollars just for one eye!"
Lucile was glad to escape, without uttering a syllable. Pursuing her way homewards, she pondered deeply over the singular remark with which Pollexfen closed the conversation, and half muttering, said to herself, "Can he be in earnest? or is it simply the odd way in which an eccentric man pays a compliment?" But long before she could solve the enigma, other thoughts, far more engrossing, took sole possession of her mind.
She fully realized her situation—a dying father, and a sick lover, both dependent in a great measure upon her exertions, and she herself not yet past her seventeenth year.