wandered
as pilgrims whose feet stray back in the worn ways and find their own
old footprints there, ... and after a few moments Miss Desprey was like
to be farther away from his meditations than Centreville is from Paris,
and the personality of the dream-woman was another. Once Miss
Desprey's voice startled him out of such a reverie by bidding him,
"_Please_ take the pose, Mr. Bulstrode!" As he laughed and apologized
he caught her eyes fixed on him with, as he thought, a curious
expression of affection and sympathy--indeed, tears sprang to them.
She reddened and went furiously back to work. She was more personal
that day than she had yet been. She seemed, after having surprised his
absent-mindedness, to feel that she had a right to him--quite ordered
him about, and was almost petulant in her exactions of his positions.

Her work evidently advanced to her satisfaction.

As she stood elated before her easel, her hair in sunny disorder, her
eyes like stars, Bulstrode was conscious there was a change in her--she
was excited and tremulous. In her frayed dress, sagging at the edges,
her paint-smeared apron, her slender thumb through the hole in the
palette, she came over to him at the close of the sitting, started to
speak, faltered, and said:

"You don't know what it means to me--all you have done. And I can't
ever tell you."

"Oh, don't," he pleaded, "pray don't speak of it!"

Miss Desprey, half radiant and half troubled, turned away as if she
were afraid of his eyes.

"No, I won't try to tell you. I couldn't, I don't dare," she
whispered, and impulsively caught his hand and kissed it.

When he had left the studio finally it was with a bewildering sense of
having kissed her hand--no, both of her hands! but one held her palette
and he _couldn't_ have kissed that one without having got paint on his
nose--perhaps he had! He was not at peace.

That same night a telegram brought him news to the effect that Miss
Desprey was ill and would not expect him to pose the following day; and
relieved that it was not required of him to resume immediately the
over-charged relations, he went back to his old habit, rudely broken
into by his artistic escapade, and walked far into the Bois.

He thought with alarming persistency of Miss Desprey. He was
chivalrous with women, old-fashioned and clean-minded and
straight-lived. In the greatest, in the only passion of his life, he
had been a Chevalier Bayard, and he could lo