He noticed for the first time that her face had grown almost colorless. He could see the lips that carried a touch of rebelliousness, framing themselves into what seemed a line of fortitude. It added to her air of maturity. Yet she became girlish again as she met his glance with what was almost a look of audacity. “I didn’t intend you to see it,” she told him, and he felt that there was now almost a challenge in that steady gaze of hers. “Why not?” he asked, nettled by a sense of remoteness drifting between them. “Because I know my aunts would not wish it to be seen. It has been kept hidden year after year.” “Why?” repeated Conkling. She was silent for a moment or two. She was no longer looking at him. But for the second time he became conscious of the achieved air of fortitude in her averted face. “They would say it was—it was sinful.” She stood silent a moment when he asked for the reason. “Because it’s a nude,” she finally said, looking up at him. He had no means of judging what that moment was costing her. He could even afford to smile a little. “Well,” he demanded, “what of that?” “I’ve already told you that my aunts do not approve of such things,” she said with an appeal in her eyes which he could not understand. “Do _you_?” he queried almost bruskly. He noticed that her pallor had increased in the last minute or two. “Yes, I do,” she said with a return of her earlier defiant tone. “I can’t help feeling that this picture is beautiful. I know there is nothing wrong about it—that there is nothing to be ashamed of in looking at it.” “Why should there be?” he demanded. The girl’s glance wandered involuntarily back toward the stairhead. “They would say it was wrong.” That reiterated use of the pronoun began to impress him with the extent to which “they” had dominated and dwarfed her life. “But some of the world’s most beautiful and most valuable pictures are nudes,” he protested. “Surely we don’t need to go into all that!” “I’ve felt that way,” she said after a silence, as though the confession were a relinquishment of something momentous, of something which she would not lightly part with. “Would you rather I didn’t see this picture?” he asked with a second wind of patience, troubled by the look on her face. “No!” she said almost with fierceness. “I want you to see it! You must see it!” CHAPTER SEVEN Julia Keswick stooped low as she stepped in under the sloping roof, coming to a stop before a large canvas, covered with faded blue-and-white ticking, which leaned against the wall. Conkling watched her, with a revived impression of the epochal close about him, as she drew away this ticking and swung the framed picture about so that it faced him.