"Mrs. Detlor," he said, "you may trust me, on my honor."

She looked at him, not searchingly, but with a clear, honest gaze such as one sees oftenest in the eyes of children, yet she had seen the duplicities of life backward and said calmly, "Yes, I can trust you."

"An artist's subject ought to be sacred to him," he said. "It becomes himself, and then it isn't hard--to be silent."

They walked for a few moments, saying nothing. The terrace was filling with people, so they went upon the veranda and sat down. There were no chairs near them. They were quite at the end.

"Please light a cigar," she said with a little laugh. "We must not look serious. a.s.sume your light comedy manner as you listen, and I will wear the true Columbine expression. We are under the eyes of the curious."

"Not too much light comedy for me," he said. "I shall look forbidding lest your admirers bombard us."

They were quiet again.

"This is the story," she said at last, folding her hands before her. "No, no," she added hastily, "I will not tell you the story, I will try and picture one scene. And when I have finished, tell me if you don't think I have a capital imagination." She drew herself up with a little gesture of mockery. "It is comedy, you know.

"Her name was Marion Conquest. She was beautiful--they said that of her then--and young, only sixteen. She had been very happy, for a man said that he loved her, and she wore his ring on her finger. One day, while she was visiting at a place far from her home, she was happier than usual. She wished to be by herself to wonder how it was that one could be so happy.

You see, she was young and did not think often. She only lived. She took a horse and rode far away into the woods. She came near a cottage among the trees. She got off her horse and led it. Under a tree she saw a man and a woman. The man's arm was round the woman. A child four or five years old was playing at their feet--at the feet of its father and mother. * * * The girl came forward and faced the man--the man she had sworn to marry. As I said, his ring was on her finger."

She paused. People were pa.s.sing near, and she smiled and bowed once or twice, but Hagar saw that the fire in her eyes had deepened.

"Is it strong enough for your picture?" she said quietly.

"It is as strong as it is painful. Yet there is beauty in it, too, for I see the girl's face."

"You see much in her face, of course, for you look at it as an artist.

You see shame, indignation, bitterness--what else?"

"I see that moment of awe when the girl suddenly became a woman--as the serious day breaks all at once through the haze of morning."

"I know you can paint the picture," she said, "but you have no model for the girl. How shall you imagine her?"

"I said that I would paint you in the scene," he answered slowly.

"But I am not young, as she was; am not--so good to look at."

"I said that I saw beauty in the girl's face. I can only see it through yours."

Her hands clasped tightly before her. Her eyes turned full on him for an instant, then looked away into the dusk. There was silence for a long time now. His cigar burned brightly. People kept pa.s.sing and repa.s.sing on the terrace below them. Their serious silence was noticeable.

"A penny for your thoughts," she said gayly, yet with a kind of wistfulness.

"You would be thrown away at the price."

These were things that she longed yet dreaded to hear. She was not free (at least she dreaded so) to listen to such words.

"I am sorry for that girl, G.o.d knows!" he added.

"She lived to be always sorry for herself. She was selfish. She could have thrived on happiness. She did not need suffering. She has been merry, gay, but never happy."

"The sequel was sad?"

"Terribly sad."

"Will you tell me--the scene?"

"I will, but not to-night." She drew her hands across her eyes and forehead. "You are not asking merely as the artist now?" She knew the answer, but she wanted to hear it.

"A man who is an artist asks, and he wishes to be a friend to that woman, to do her any service possible."

"Who can tell when she might need befriending?"

He would not question further. She had said all she could until she knew who the stranger was.

"I must go in," she said. "It is late."

"Tell me one thing. I want it for my picture--as a key to the mind of the girl. What did she say at that painful meeting in the woods--to the man?"

Mrs. Detlor looked at him as if she would read him through and through.

Presently she drew a ring from her finger slowly and gave it to him, smiling bitterly.

"Read inside. That is what she said."

By the burning end of his cigar he read, "You told a lie."

At another hotel a man sat in a window looking out on the esplanade. He spoke aloud.

"'You told a lie,' was all she said, and as G.o.d's in heaven I've never forgotten I was a liar from that day to this."

CHAPTER II.

THE MEETING.

The next morning George Hagar was early at the pump-room. He found it amusing to watch the crowds coming and going--earnest invalids and that most numerous body of middle aged, middle cla.s.s people who have no particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is getting even with their appet.i.tes. He could pick out every order at a glance--he did not need to wait until he saw the tumblers at their lips.

Now and then a dashing girl came gliding in, and, though the draft was noxious to her, drank the stuff off with a neutral look and well bred indifference to the distress about her. Or in strode the private secretary of some distinguished being in London, S.W. He invariably carried his gla.s.s to the door, drank it off in languid sips as he leaned indolently against the masonry, and capped the event by purchasing a rose for his b.u.t.tonhole, so making a ceremony which smacked of federating the world at a common public drinking trough into a little fete. Or there were the good priests from a turbulent larruping island, who with cheeks blushing with health and plump waistcoats came ambling, smiling, to their thirty ounces of noisome liquor. Then, there was Baron, the bronzed, idling, comfortable trader from Zanzibar, who, after fifteen years of hide and seek with fever and Arabs and sudden death--wherewith were all manner of accident and sundry profane dealings not intended for The Times or Exeter hall, comes back to sojourn in quiet "Christom" places, a lamb in temper, a lion at heart, an honest soul who minds his own business, is enemy to none but the malicious, and lives in daily wonder that the wine he drank the night before gets into trouble with the waters drunk in the morning. And the days, weeks and months go on, but Baron remains, having seen population after population of water drinkers come and go. He was there years ago. He is there still, coming every year, and he does not know that George Hagar has hung him at Burlington House more than once, and he remembers very well the pretty girl he did not marry, who also, on one occasion, joined the aristocratic company "on the line."

This young and pretty girl--Miss Mildred Margrave--came and went this morning, and a peculiar, meditative look on her face, suggesting some recent experience, caused the artist to transfer her to his notebook. Her step was sprightly, her face warm and cheerful in hue, her figure excellent, her walk the most admirable thing about her--swaying, graceful, lissom--like perfect dancing with the whole body. Her walk was immediately merged into somebody else's--merged melodiously, if one may say so. A man came from the pump-room looking after the girl, and Hagar remarked a similar swaying impulsion in the walk of both. He walked as far as the gate of the pump-room, then sauntered back, unfolded a newspaper, closed it up again, lit a cigar, and, like Hagar, stood watching the crowd abstractedly. He was an outstanding figure. Ladies, as they waited, occasionally looked at him through their gla.s.ses, and the d.u.c.h.ess of Brevoort thought he would make a picturesque figure for a reception--she was not less sure because his manner was neither savage nor suburban.

George Hagar was known to some people as "the fellow who looks back of you." Mark Telford might have been spoken of as "the man who looks through you," for, when he did glance at a man or woman, it was with keen directness, affecting the person looked at like a flash of light to the eye. It is easy to write such things, not so easy to verify them, but any one that has seen the sleuthlike eyes of men accustomed to dealing with danger in the shape of wild beasts or treacherous tribes or still more treacherous companions, and whose lives depend upon their feeling for peril and their unerring vigilance can see what George Hagar saw in Mark Telford's looks.

Telford's glance went round the crowd, appearing to rest for an instant on every person, and for a longer time on Hagar. The eyes of the two men met.

Both were immediately puzzled, for each had a sensation of some subterranean origin. Telford immediately afterward pa.s.sed out of the gate and went toward the St. Cloud gardens, where the band was playing. For a time Hagar did not stir, but idled with his pencil and notebook. Suddenly he started, and hurried out in the direction Telford had gone.

"I was an a.s.s," he said to himself, "not to think of that at first."

He entered the St. Cloud gardens and walked round the promenade a few times, but without finding him. Presently, however, Alpheus Richmond, whose beautiful and brilliant waistcoat and bra.s.s b.u.t.tons with monogram adorned showed advantageously in the morning sunshine, said to him: "I say, Hagar, who's that chap up there filling the door of the summer house?

Lord, rather!"