apadose did not
know was the way that during these weeks he neglected other orders:
women have no faculty of imagination with regard to a man's work beyond
a vague idea that it doesn't matter. In fact Lyon put off everything and
made several celebrities wait. There were half-hours of silence, when he
plied his brushes, during which he was mainly conscious that Everina was
sitting there. She easily fell into that if he did not insist on
talking, and she was not embarrassed nor bored by it. Sometimes she took
up a book--there were plenty of them about; sometimes, a little way off,
in her chair, she watched his progress (though without in the least
advising or correcting), as if she cared for every stroke that
represented her daughter. These strokes were occasionally a little wild;
he was thinking so much more of his heart than of his hand. He was not
more embarrassed than she was, but he was agitated: it was as if in the
sittings (for the child, too, was beautifully quiet) something was
growing between them or had already grown--a tacit confidence, an
inexpressible secret. He felt it that way; but after all he could not be
sure that she did. What he wanted her to do for him was very little; it
was not even to confess that she was unhappy. He would be
superabundantly gratified if she should simply let him know, even by a
silent sign, that she recognised that with him her life would have been
finer. Sometimes he guessed--his presumption went so far--that he might
see this sign in her contentedly sitting there.

III

At last he broached the question of painting the Colonel: it was now
very late in the season--there would be little time before the general
dispersal. He said they must make the most of it; the great thing was to
begin; then in the autumn, with the resumption of their London life,
they could go forward. Mrs. Capadose objected to this that she really
could not consent to accept another present of such value. Lyon had
given her the portrait of herself of old, and he had seen what they had
had the indelicacy to do with it. Now he had offered her this beautiful
memorial of the child--beautiful it would evidently be when it was
finished, if he could ever satisfy himself; a precious possession which
they would cherish for ever. But his generosity must stop there--they
couldn't be so tremendously 'beholden' to him. They couldn't order the
picture--of course he would understand that, without her explaining: it