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rejoin her companions she got up from her
place on my mother's toes. The young men presented their backs to us;
they were leaning on the rail of the cliff. Our incident had produced a
certain awkwardness, and while I was thinking of what next to say she
exclaimed irrelevantly: "Don't you know? He'll be Lord Considine." At
that moment the youth marked for this high destiny turned round, and
she spoke to my mother. "I'll introduce him to you--he's awfully nice."
She beckoned and invited him with her parasol; the movement struck
me as taking everything for granted. I had heard of Lord Considine and
if I had not been able to place Lord Iffield it was because I didn't know
the name of his eldest son. The young man took no notice of Miss
Saunt's appeal; he only stared a moment and then on her repeating it
quietly turned his back. She was an odd creature: she didn't blush at this;
she only said to my mother apologetically, but with the frankest
sweetest amusement, "You don't mind, do you? He's a monster of
shyness!" It was as if she were sorry for every one--for Lord Iffield, the
victim of a complaint so painful, and for my mother, the subject of a
certain slight. "I'm sure I don't want him!" said my mother, but Flora
added some promise of how she would handle him for his rudeness.
She would clearly never explain anything by any failure of her own
appeal. There rolled over me while she took leave of us and floated
back to her friends a wave of superstitious dread. I seemed somehow to
see her go forth to her fate, and yet what should fill out this orb of a
high destiny if not such beauty and such joy? I had a dim idea that Lord
Considine was a great proprietor, and though there mingled with it a
faint impression that I shouldn't like his son the result of the two

images was a whimsical prayer that the girl mightn't miss her possible
fortune.
CHAPTER IV

One day in the course of the following June there was ushered into my
studio a gentleman whom I had not yet seen but with whom I had been
very briefly in correspondence. A letter from him had expressed to me
some days before his regret on learning that my "splendid portrait" of
Miss Flora Louisa Saunt, whose full name figured by her own wish in
the catalogue of the exhibition of the Academy, had found a purchaser
before the close of the private view. He took the liberty of inquiring
whether I might have at his service some other memorial of the same
lovely head, some preliminary sketch, some study for the picture. I had
replied that I had indeed painted Miss Saunt more than once and that if
he were interested in my work I should be happy to show him what I
had done. Mr. Geoffrey Dawling, the person thus introduced to me,
stumbled into my room with awkward movements and equivocal
sounds-- a long, lean, confused, confusing young man, with a bad
complexion and large protrusive teeth. He bore in its most indelible
pressure the postmark, as it were, of Oxford, and as soon as he opened
his mouth I perceived, in addition to a remarkable revelation of gums,
that the text of the queer communication matched the registered
envelope. He was full of refinements and angles, of dreary and
distinguished knowledge. Of his unconscious drollery his dress freely
partook; it seemed, from the gold ring into which his red necktie was
passed to the square toe-caps of his boots, to conform with a high sense
of modernness to the fashion before the last. There were moments
when his overdone urbanity, all suggestive stammers and interrogative
quavers, made him scarcely intelligible; but I felt him to be a
gentleman and I liked the honesty of his errand and the expression of
his good green eyes.
As a worshipper at the shrine of beauty, however, he needed explaining,
especially when I found he had no acquaintance with my brilliant
model; had on the mere evidence of my picture taken, as he said, a

tremendous fancy to her looks. I ought doubtless to have been
humiliated by the simplicity of his judgment of them, a judgment for
which the rendering was lost in the subject, quite leaving out the
element of art. He was like the innocent reader for whom the story is
"really true" and the author a negligible quantity. He had come to me
only because he wanted to purchase, and I remember being so amused
at his attitude, which I had never seen equally marked in a person of
education, that I asked him why, for the