use the afternoon sun was burning
full upon its shutters. The portrait hung over the mantel, in a bad
light, but the painter could feel everything in it that he could not
see.

"Yes, it had that look in it."

"Well, she ha'n't took wing yet, I'm thankful to think," said Whitwell,
and he spoke from his own large mind to the sympathy of an old friend
who he felt could almost share his feelings as a father.

LV

When Westover turned out of the baking little street where the Whitwells
lived into an elm-shaded stretch of North Avenue, he took off his hat
and strolled bareheaded along in the cooler air. He was disappointed not
to have seen Cynthia, and yet he found himself hurrying away after his
failure, with a sense of escape, or at least of respite.

What he had come to say, to do, was the effect of long experience and
much meditation. The time had arrived when he could no longer feign to
himself that his feelings toward the girl were not those of a lover,
but he had his modest fears that she could never imagine him in that
character, and that if he should ask her to do so he should shock and
grieve her, and inflict upon himself an incurable wound.

During this last absence of his he had let his fancy dwell constantly
upon her, until life seemed worth having only if she would share it with
him. He was an artist, and he had always been a bohemian, but at heart
he was philistine and bourgeois. His ideal was a settlement, a fixed
habitation, a stated existence, a home where he could work constantly in
an air of affection, and unselfishly do his part to make his home happy.
It was a very simple-hearted ambition, and I do not quite know how to
keep it from appearing commonplace and almost sordid; but such as it
was, I must confess that it was his. He had not married his model,
because he was mainly a landscapist, perhaps; and he had not married any
of his pupils, because he had not been in love with them, charming
and good and lovely as he had thought some of them; and of late he had
realized more and more why his fancy had not turned in their direction.
He perceived that it was already fixed, and possibly had long been
fixed.

He did not blink the fact that there were many disparities, and
that there would be certain disadvantages which could never be quite
overcome. The fact had been brought rather strenuously home to him by
his interview with Cynthia's father. He perceived, as indeed he had
always known, that