“It’s perfectly angelic of me to come to-day, Robert,” she remarked, as she greeted him, “for I’m not in the mood for a sitting and, of course, I shall behave abominably.” “And you wish me to be bowed in the dust with gratitude for your angelic determination to behave abominably?” he replied dryly, looking at her with all an artist’s perception of her beauty and a reluctant consciousness that the glow in her eyes and the color in her cheeks were purely responses to the keen winter air, and that neither had ever been inspired by his presence nor called into being by his words. Meanwhile Rose moved unconsciously before the long mirror, and removing her hat, slightly and deftly rearranged her beautiful and luxuriant hair as she answered him. “Why not?” she said banteringly; “you can’t believe that any one likes to pose for an hour--even to be made into one of your delightful pictures--but I’ll try to behave beautifully if you’ll answer all my questions, instead of going on with your painting, with a cigarette between your teeth and with the face of a sphinx, as you did the other day!” “When you asked a dozen questions I couldn’t answer!” Allestree was selecting his brushes and contemplating the canvas on his easel with a despairing eye. He had already outlined Rose’s figure and decided on the desired pose, but it seemed to him impossible to do justice to the exquisite charm of her beauty. It was a simple picture; he had endeavored to preserve what seemed to him the keynote of her personality, and had forborne to use any of those effects of brilliant color, rich draperies and elaborate accessories which a portrait painter commonly loves to lavish on a beautiful subject; instead, he had made her figure, with its superb poise, stand out in absolute simplicity. To Allestree she personified all the glorious possibilities of youth, with its buoyant hopes, its poignant truth, its magnificent faith in life, in the world, in itself. But when he looked from her to the canvas--where he had hoped to express something of all this--he felt deeply discouraged; his brush might be touched with the magic of a deep if unspoken passion, but it could never paint her as she appeared to him! “I do not remember asking anything but the simplest questions,” she remarked, as she took her seat in the carved armchair which he had placed for her before a curtain of soft deep blue which seemed to suggest an April sky; “only you didn’t want to answer them. I warn you that I mean to be answered to-day! There’s nothing so abominable as your silences.” Allestree smiled a little as he began to paint, with a slow and reluctant touch, feeling his way toward some achievement which might at least foreshadow success. “I fancied there was a virtue in silence; there’s a copy-book axiom to that effect,” he remarked; “besides, you would never come here at all punctually if you are not left in doubt on some mooted point. Mystery lures a woman as surely as magic.”