ck to her friends a wave of tenderness superstitious
and silly. I seemed somehow to see her go forth to her fate; and yet
what should fill out this orb of a high destiny if not such beauty and
such joy? I had a dim idea that Lord Considine was a great proprietor,
and though there mingled with it a faint impression that I shouldn't
like his son the result of the two images was a whimsical prayer that
the girl mightn't miss her possible fortune.

IV

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my
studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been very
briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me some
days before his regret on learning that my "splendid portrait" of Titras
Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in the
catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser before
the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring whether
I might have at his service some other memorial of the same lovely head,
some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had replied
that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if he were
interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I had done.
Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me, stumbled into
my room with awkward movements and equivocal sounds--a long, lean,
confused, confusing young man, with a bad complexion and large,
protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible pressure the postmark,
as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened his mouth I perceived,
in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums, that the text of the
queer communication matched the registered envelope. He was full of
refinements and angles, of dreary and distinguished knowledge. Of his
unconscious drollery his dress freely partook; it seemed, from the gold
ring into which his red necktie was passed to the square toe-caps of his
boots, to conform with a high sense of modernness to the fashion before
the last. There were moments when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive
stammers and interrogative quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but
I felt him to be a gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and
the expression of his good green eyes.

As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty however he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant model;
had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a