Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/223

Rh not speak again. She left him there and crossed the sloping, parched lawn and entered the house.

Conkling, as he unfolded his camp stool and set up his easel, resented the passing of that slender and lightly swaying figure. The riot of color along the tangled garden paths seemed without meaning. The tones that had first caught his eyes became crude and uncoordinated under a hot afternoon sun. But he remembered what she had said, and he sat there, washing absurd colors together and wondering if she would come back. Then, as the shadows lengthened and time dragged on, he wondered if he was to be ignored even by the monitorial old aunts. But he daubed stubbornly on, and when his patience was all but exhausted he was rewarded by seeing a figure emerge from the house.

It was a remarkable figure, and as it bore down on him in silence he studied it with oblique intentness. For it was that of an extremely tall and an extremely angular woman, well past middle life, clad in rusty black silk. On the iron-gray hair,