dless way that he loved her, yet could she be mistaken? Would
he ever speak, since he had not spoken at the cliff? Her own eyes had
held a declaration, and she had read in his that he understood the
message. His silence at that time must be taken to mean silence for
all time.

Saxon had reached his conclusion. He knew that he had hurt her pride,
had rejected his opportunity. But that might be a transient grief for
her. For him, it would of course be permanent. Men may love at twenty,
and recover and love again, even to the number of many times, but to
live to the age which he guessed his years would total, and then love
as he did, was irremediable. For just that reason, he must remain
silent, and must go away. To enter her life by the gate she seemed
willing to open for him would mean the taking into that sacred
inclosure of every hideous possibility that clouded his own future. He
must not enter the gate, and, in order to be sure that a second mad
impulse would not drive him through it, he must put distance between
himself and the gate.

On one point, he temporized. He was eager to do one piece of work
that should be his masterpiece. The greatest achievement of his art
life must be her portrait. He wanted to paint it, not in the
conventional evening-gown in which she seemed a young queen among
women, but in the environment that he liked to think was her own by
divine right. It was the dryad that he sought to put on canvas.

He asked her with so much genuine pleading in his voice that she
smilingly consented, and the sittings began in the old-fashioned
garden at Horton House. She was posed under a spread of branches and
in such a position that the sun struck down through the leaves,
kissing into color her cheeks and eyes and hair. It was a pose that
called for a daring palette, one which, if he succeeded in getting on
his canvas what he felt, would give a result whereon he might well
rest his reputation. But to him it meant more than just that, for it
was giving expression to what he saw through his love of art and his
art of love.

The hours given to the first sittings were silent hours, but that was
not remarkable. Saxon always worked in silence, though there were
times when he painted with gritted teeth because of thoughts he read
in the face he was studying--thoughts which the model did not know her
face revealed. At times, Mrs. Horton sat in the shade near by, and
watched the hand that nursed the canvas with i