were a promise, a possibility, now they are--what are they?
They are the same; they are not the same. She is disappointed in them;
not because their beauty has faded, but that their look has changed.
Their faces are not haggard, nor cut with strange arabesques of pain
and care, nor are they craven or vicious; but the artist speeds his
hand as if at play, while every touch is bringing the faces out until
they obliterate the former beauty utterly. The landscape is still dewy
fresh and fair--the faces have no hint of morning in them. Faces, not
bad, but lacking tenderness; expression, self-sufficient; eyes, frosty
cold; and the woman's eyes light on the children, playing beside the
white farmhouse, and in them is no inexpressible tenderness of
mother-love, mute, like a caress; prosperous faces the world has gone
quite well with, that is plain, but faces having no beckoning in them,
no tender invitation, like a sweet voice, saying, "Enter and welcome."
And she who looked at the pictures sobbed, scarcely knowing why, only
the man and woman sorely disappointed her when they had grown to
maturity; poetry and welcome and promise had faded from them as tints
fade from a withered flower. So much was promised--so little was
fulfilled.

Meantime, while these lovers sit on the hillside, and the artist has
been talking in pictures as the clouds do, the sun has sloped far
toward setting. The west is aflame, like a burning palace; the crows
are flapping tired wings toward their nests; the swallows are sporting
in the air, as children do in surf of the blue seas; smoke from the
farm chimneys visible begins to lie level across the sky, and stays
like a cloud at anchor. But the artist's hand is busy with another
picture.

And the landscape is the same. Mayhap he is not versatile; and, think
again, mayhap he has purpose in his reduplication. Like wise men, let
us wait and see. A springtime-land as of old, and two figures; and the
woman he loves watches, while her breathing is strangely like a sob.
Now the figures are a man and a woman, stooped and gray. "Age," she
says, "you paint age now, and age--is not beautiful;" and he, answering
with neither lips nor eyes, paints swiftly on. The man is aged and
leaning on a staff. His strength is gone. His staff is not for
ornament, but need. The woman is wrinkled, and her hair is snowy
white; and the girl at the artist's side tries vainly to suppress a
sob. She, too, will soon be gr