Aline, her slight bosom still heaving with the after-storm of emotion, said nothing, but drew the cloth from the canvas. Norma started back in-surprise. She had not anticipated seeing her own portrait.
“Oh, but it is beautiful!” she cried involuntarily.
“Yes—more than beautiful,” said Aline, and mechanically she moved the chair into the full light of the window.
Norma looked at the picture for a long time, stepped back and looked at herself in the mirror of the overmantel, and returned to the picture. And as she looked the soul behind the picture spoke to her. The message delivered, she glanced at Aline.
“It is not I, that woman. I wish to God it were.” She put her hands up to her face, and took a step or two across the room, and repeated a little wildly, “I wish to God it were!”
“It is very, very like you,” said Aline softly, recovering her girl's worship of the other's stately beauty.
Norma caught her by the arm and pointed at the portrait.
“Can't you see the difference?”
But the soul behind the picture had not spoken to Aline. There was love hovering around the pictured woman's lips; happy tenderness and trust and promise mingled in her eyes; in so far as the shadow of a flower-like woman's passion could strain her features, so were her features strained. Yet she looked out of the canvas a proud, queenly woman, capable of heroisms and lofty sacrifice. She was one who loved deeply and demanded love in return. She was warm of the flesh, infinitely pure of the spirit. The face was the face of Norma, but the soul was that of the dream-woman who had come and sat in the sitter's chair and communed with Jimmie as he painted her. And Norma heard her voice. It was an indictment of her life, a judgment and a sentence.
“I am glad you can't, dear,” she said to Aline, regaining her balance. “Tell him I shall prize it above all my wedding-gifts.”