"Thank you. I should like to very much," said Betty. "I don"t care,"
she said to herself, "and besides, it"s not as if he were a young man, or a tourist, or anything. He must be ever so old--thirty; I shouldn"t wonder if he was thirty-five."
When she saw the picture she merely said, "Oh," and stood at gaze. For it _was_ a picture--a picture that, seen in foreign lands, might well make one sick with longing for the dry turf and the pale dog violets that love the chalk, for the hum of the bees and the scent of the thyme. He had chosen the bold sweep of the brown upland against the sky, and low to the left, where the line broke, the dim violet of the Kentish hills. In the green foreground the pink figure, just roughly blocked in, was blocked in by a hand that knew its trade, and was artist to the tips of its fingers.
"Oh!" said Betty again.
"Yes," said he, "I think I"ve got it this time. I think it"ll make a hole in the wall, eh? Yes; it is good!"
"Yes," said Betty; "oh, yes."
"Do you often go a-sketching?" he asked.
"How modest he is," thought Betty; "he changes the subject so as not to seem to want to be praised."
Aloud she answered with shy fluttered earnestness: "Yes--no. I don"t know. Sometimes."
His lips were grave, but there was the light behind his eyes that goes with a smile.
"What unnecessary agitation!" he was thinking. "Poor little thing, I suppose she"s never seen a man before. Oh, these country girls!" Aloud he was saying: "This is such a perfect country. You ought to sketch every day."
"I"ve no one to teach me," said Betty, innocently phrasing a long-felt want.
The man raised his eyebrows. "Well, after that, here goes!" he said to himself. "I wish you"d let _me_ teach you," he said to her, beginning to put his traps together.
"Oh, I didn"t mean that," said Betty in real distress. What would he think of her? How greedy and grasping she must seem! "I didn"t mean that at all!"
"No; but I do," he said.
"But you"re a great artist," said Betty, watching him with clasped hands. "I suppose it would be--I mean--don"t you know, we"re not rich, and I suppose your lessons are worth pounds and pounds."
"I don"t give lessons for money," his lips tightened--"only for love."
"That means nothing, doesn"t it?" she said, and flushed to find herself on the defensive feebly against--nothing.
"At tennis, yes," he said, and to himself he added: "_Vieux jeu_, my dear, but you did it very prettily."
"But I couldn"t let you give me lessons for nothing."
"Why not?" he asked. And his calmness made Betty feel ashamed and sordid.
"I don"t know," she answered tremulously, "but I don"t think my step-father would want me to."
"You think it would annoy him?"
"I"m sure it would, if he knew about it."
Betty was thinking how little her step-father had ever cared to know of her and her interests. But the man caught the ball as he saw it.
"Then why let him know?" was the next move; and it seemed to him that Betty"s move of rejoinder came with a readiness born of some practice at the game.
"Oh," she said innocently, "I never thought of that! But wouldn"t it be wrong?"
"She"s got the whole thing stereotyped. But it"s dainty type anyhow,"
he thought. "Of course it wouldn"t be wrong," he said. "It wouldn"t hurt him. Don"t you know that nothing"s wrong unless it hurts somebody?"
"Yes," she said eagerly, "that"s what I think. But all the same it doesn"t seem fair that you should take all that trouble for me and get nothing in return."
"Well played! We"re getting on!" he thought, and added aloud: "But perhaps I shan"t get nothing in return?"
Her eyes dropped over the wonderful thought that perhaps she might do something for _him_. But what? She looked straight at him, and the innocent appeal sent a tiny thorn of doubt through his armour of complacency. Was she--after all? No, no novice could play the game so well. And yet--
"I would do anything I could, you know," she said eagerly, "because it is so awfully kind of you, and I do so want to be able to paint. What can I do?"
"What can you do?" he asked, and brought his face a little nearer to the pretty flushed freckled face under the shabby hat. Her eyes met his. He felt a quick relenting, and drew back.
"Well, for one thing you could let me paint your portrait."
Betty was silent.
"Come, play up, you little duffer," he urged inwardly.
When she spoke her voice trembled.
"I don"t know how to thank you," she said.
"And you will?"
"Oh, I will; indeed I will!"
"How good and sweet you are," he said. Then there was a silence.
Betty tightened the strap of her sketching things and said:
"I think I ought to go home now."
He had the appropriate counter ready.
"Ah, don"t go yet!" he said; "let us sit down; see, that bank is quite in the shade now, and tell me--"
"Tell you what?" she asked, for he had made the artistic pause.
"Oh, anything--anything about yourself."
Betty was as incapable of flight as any bird on a limed twig.
She walked beside him to the bank, and sat down at his bidding, and he lay at her feet, looking up into her eyes. He asked idle questions: she answered them with a conscientious tremulous truthfulness that showed to him as the most finished art. And it seemed to him a very fortunate accident that he should have found here, in this unlikely spot, so accomplished a player at his favorite game. Yet it was the variety of his game for which he cared least. He did not greatly relish a skilled adversary. Betty told him nervously and in words ill-chosen everything that he asked to know, but all the while the undercurrent of questions rang strong within her--"When is he to teach me? Where? How?"--so that when at last there was left but the bare fifteen minutes needed to get one home in time for the midday dinner she said abruptly:
"And when shall I see you again?"