Part 61 (2/2)
”Nonsense!” she exclaimed, trying to hide her feelings by a little brusqueness, ”I'm as human a girl as there is in this city, and will try your patience a hundred times before the year is out. Come, let us go and visit this proud artist. He had better beware, or he may find an expression on my face that he won't like if I should decide to give him a sitting.”
But the artist did like the expression of Ida's face as he glanced up from his work with great frequency and with an admiring glow in his eyes that was anything but cool and business-like. Even her jealous love had not detected a tone or act in his reception of her father that was not all she could ask, and she had never seen the poor man look so pleased and hopeful as when he left the studio for his office. There had not been a particle of patronage in Van Berg's manner, but only the cordial and respectful courtesy of a younger gentleman towards an elderly one. Mr. Mayhew had been made at home at once, and before he left, the artist had obtained his promise to come again with his daughter on the following morning.
”His bearing towards father was the perfection of good breeding,”
thought Ida, and it would seem that some of the grat.i.tude with which her heart overflowed found its way into her tones and eyes.
”You look so pleasantly and kindly, that you must be thinking of Mr. Eltinge,” said Van Berg.
”You are not to paint my thoughts,” said Ida, with a quick flush.
”I wish I could.”
”I'm glad you can't.”
”You do puzzle one, Miss Mayhew. On the day of our visit to the old garden your thoughts seemed as clear to me as the water of the little brook, and I supposed I saw all that was in your mind. But before the day was over I felt that I did not understand you at all.”
”Mr. Van Berg, I'm astonished you are an artist.”
”Because of the character of my work?”
”No, indeed. But such a wonderful taste for solving problems suggests a metaphysician. I think you would become discouraged with such tasks. Just think how many ladies there are in the world, and I'm sure any one of them is a more abstruse problem than I am.”
The artist looked up at her in surprise and bit his lip with a faint trace of embarra.s.sment, but he said, after a moment, ”But it does not follow that they are interesting problems.”
”You don't know,” she replied.
”And never shall,” he added. ”I do know, however, that you are a very interesting one.”
”I didn't agree to come here to be solved as a problem,” she said demurely, but with a mirthful twinkle in her eyes; ”I only promised you a sitting for the sake of Mr. Eltinge.”
”Two sittings, Miss Mayhew.”
”Well, yes, if two are needful.”
”By all the nine muses! you do not expect me to make a good picture from only two sittings?”
”You know how slight is my acquaintance with any of those superior divinities, and in this sacred haunt of theirs I feel that I should express all my opinions with bated breath; but truly, Mr. Van Berg, I thought you could make a picture from the sketch you made in the garden.”
”Yes, I could make A picture, but every sitting you will give enables me to make a better picture, and you know how much we both owe to Mr. Eltinge.”
”I'm learning every day how much, how very much, I owe to him,”
she said, earnestly.
”Then for his sake you will promise to come as often as I wish you to,” was his eager response, and it was so eager that she looked up at him in surprise.
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