An Unpardonable Liar | Page 8

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 passing 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 passing and repassing 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, God 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 God'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 class people who have no particular reason for drinking the waters, and whose only regimen is getting even with their appetites. 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 glass 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 buttonhole, 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