She could not tell him. She could not tell--that between her and her
thought of Randy was the barrier of all that George Dalton had meant to
her.
"If you paint the picture," she evaded, "you must finish it at
Huntersfield. Why can't you and Louise come down this winter? It would
be heavenly."
"It would be Heaven for me. Do you mean it, Becky?"
She did mean it, and she told him so.
"I shall paint you," he planned, "as a little white slip of a girl, with
pearls about your neck, and dreams in your eyes, and back of you a
flight of shadowy swans----"
They rose and walked on. "I thought you were to be with the Admiral in
Boston this winter."
"I stay until Thanksgiving. I always go back to Huntersfield for
Christmas."
After that it was decided that she should sit for him each morning. They
did not speak again of Randy. There had been something in Becky's manner
which kept Archibald from saying more.
When they reached the lighthouse, the wind was blowing strongly. Before
them was the sweep of the Nantucket Shoals--not a ship in sight, not a
line of smoke, the vast emptiness of heaving waters.
Becky stood at the edge of the bluff, her red cape billowing out into a
scarlet banner, her hair streaming back from her face, the velvet tam
flattened by the force of the wind.
Archibald glanced at her. "Are you cold?"
"No, I love it."
He was chilled to the bone, yet there she stood, warm with life, bright
with beating blood----
"What a beastly lot of tumbling water," he said with sudden
overmastering irritation. "Let's get away from it, Becky. Let's get
away."
Going back they took the road which led across the moor. The clear day
gave to the low hills the Persian carpet coloring which Cope had
despaired of painting. Becky, in her red cape, was almost lost against
the brilliant background.
But she was not the only one who challenged nature. For as she and
Archibald approached the outskirts of the town, they discerned, at some
distance, at the top of a slight eminence, two figures--a man and a
woman. The woman was dancing, with waving arms and flying feet.
"She calls that dance 'Morning on the Moor,'" Cope told Becky; "she has
a lot of them--'The Spirit of the Storm, 'The Wraith of the Fog.'"
"Do you know her?"
"No. But Tristram says she dances every morning. She is getting ready
for an act in one of the big musical shows."
The man sat on the ground and watched the woman dance. Her primrose cape
was across his knee. He was a big man and wore a cap. Becky, surveying
him from afar, saw nothing to command closer scrutiny. Yet had she
known, she might have found him worthy of another look. For the man with
the primrose cape was Dalton!
III
George Dalton, entering the little sitting-room of "The Whistling
Sally," had to bend his head. He was so shining and splendid that he
seemed to fill the empty spaces. It seemed, indeed, to Becky, as if he
were too shining and splendid, as if he bulked too big, like a giant,
top-heavy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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