We looked, glad to be set at our ease. Then Pelleas and I turned to each other in delicious trepidation. For there on the wall of Miss Deborah’s studio was a picture of the very garden that we two had meant to find. We recognized it at once—our garden, where Pelleas had said the Spring lane would lead between the hedgerows and where the shadows would fall differently and the echoes be long drawn to music.
I cannot tell what there may have been about that picture so to move us, and to this day I do not know what place it strove to show. But, O, I remember the green of it, the tender, early green, the half-evident boughs of indeterminate bloom, the sense of freshness, of sweet surprise at some meaning of the year, the well, the shrine, the shepherd with his pipes, the incommunicable spirit of rhythm and of echo....
“Do you like it?” asked Miss Deborah smiling, and I was abashed to find my eyes filled with tears.
“I think that this,” Pelleas answered quaintly, “will be the soul of Spring, Miss Deborah; and the outdoors this morning will be the body.”
“I dare say,” said Miss Deborah, nodding; “though I fancy more things are souls than we give them credit for,” she added.
Miss Deborah looked at us, her chin in her hand. And after a moment to our great amazement she said:—
“I shall give you this picture for a wedding gift, I think. And I tell you now so that if you are tempted to break the engagement you will think twice. Is it a picture that you want to live with?”
It was not only a picture that we wanted to live with; it was a picture whose spell would be eternal. And “Did you paint it, Miss Deborah?” we asked in our simplicity.
Miss Deborah shook her head and named a great name, then just beginning to be reverenced.
“He paints pictures better than his cook makes crumpets,” she said, “and the quality is not usual. Spend the day with me,” she added abruptly. “I would like you to see the little lovers who are sitting for my ‘Betrothed.’ I will send a message to your mother, Etarre. Sit there while I work. I like to think of you there.”