Chapter 4 - Page 2

it had never occurred to him.
He had fallen in love with a painted sign and seemed content just
to dream of what it stood for. He was the young prince in the
legend or the comedy who loses his heart to the miniature of the
princess beyond seas. Until I knew him better this puzzled me
much--the link was so missing between his sensibility and his type.
He was of course bewildered by my sketches, which implied in the
beholder some sense of intention and quality; but for one of them,
a comparative failure, he ended by conceiving a preference so
arbitrary and so lively that, taking no second look at the others,
he expressed his wish to possess it and fell into the extremity of
confusion over the question of price. I helped him over that
stile, and he went off without having asked me a direct question
about Miss Saunt, yet with his acquisition under his arm. His
delicacy was such that he evidently considered his rights to be
limited; he had acquired none at all in regard to the original of
the picture. There were others--for I was curious about him--that
I wanted him to feel I conceded: I should have been glad of his
carrying away a sense of ground acquired for coming back. To
ensure this I had probably only to invite him, and I perfectly
recall the impulse that made me forbear. It operated suddenly from
within while he hung about the door and in spite of the diffident
appeal that blinked in his gentle grin. If he was smitten with
Flora's ghost what mightn't be the direct force of the luminary
that could cast such a shadow? This source of radiance, flooding
my poor place, might very well happen to be present the next time
he should turn up. The idea was sharp within me that there were
relations and complications it was no mission of mine to bring
about. If they were to develop they should develop in their very
own sense.

Let me say at once that they did develop and that I perhaps after
all had something to do with it. If Mr. Dawling had departed
without a fresh appointment he was to reappear six months later
under protection no less powerful than that of our young lady
herself. I had seen her repeatedly for months: she had grown to
regard my studio as the temple of her beauty. This miracle was
recorded and celebrated there as nowhere else; in other places
there was occasional reference to other subjects of remark. The
degree of her presumption continued to be stupefying; there was
nothing so extraordinary save the degree in which she never paid
for it. She was kept innocent, that is she was kept safe, by her
egotism, but she was helped also, though she had now put off her
mourning, by the attitude of the lone orphan who had to be a law
unto herself. It was as a lone orphan that she came and