Walter glanced sidelong at his mistress, and started. Motionless and absorbed--fascinated as it were--in contemplation of Walter’s portrait, Elinor’s face had assumed precisely the expression of which he had just been complaining. Had she practised for whole hours before a mirror, she could not have caught the look so successfully. Had the picture itself been a mirror, it could not have thrown back her present aspect, with stronger and more melancholy truth. She appeared quite unconscious of the dialogue between the artist and her lover. “Elinor,” exclaimed Walter, in amazement, “what change has come over you?” She did not hear him, nor desist from her fixed gaze, till he seized her hand, and thus attracted her notice; then, with a sudden tremor, she looked from the picture to the face of the original. “Do you see no change in your portrait?” asked she. “In mine?--None!” replied Walter, examining it. “But let me see! Yes; there is a slight change,--an improvement, I think, in the picture, though none in the likeness. It has a livelier expression than yesterday, as if some bright thought were flashing from the eyes, and about to be uttered from the lips. Now that I have caught the look, it becomes very decided.” While he was intent on these observations, Elinor turned to the painter. She regarded him with grief and awe, and felt that he repaid her with sympathy and commiseration, though wherefore she could but vaguely guess. “That look!” whispered she, and shuddered. “How came it there?” “Madam,” said the painter, sadly, taking her hand, and leading her apart, “in both these pictures, I have painted what I saw. The artist--the true artist--must look beneath the exterior. It is his gift--his proudest but often a melancholy one--to see the inmost soul, and by a power indefinable even to himself to make it glow or darken upon the canvas, in glances that express the thought and sentiment of years. Would that I might convince myself of error in the present instance!” They had now approached the table, on which were heads in chalk, hands almost as expressive as ordinary faces, ivied church-towers, thatched cottages, old thunder-stricken trees, Oriental and antique costume, and all such picturesque vagaries of an artist’s idle moments. Turning them over, with seeming carelessness, a crayon sketch of two figures was disclosed. “If I have failed,” continued he, “if your heart does not see itself reflected in your own portrait, if you have no secret cause to trust my delineation of the other, it is not yet too late to alter them. I might change the action of these figures too. But would it influence the event?”