Page:Maud Howe - Atlanta in the South.djvu/44

 young. My youth is slipping from me, and yet my life is as old and cold as if I carried half a century of years on my shoulders. Is it my fate or my nature which compels me to put all my life and love into this wet clay, which absorbs more and more of me each day, and puts me farther and farther from my kind? I want youth and sunlight and foolish gayety. Take me somewhere where there is something young!"

She spoke passionately, and threw down her little modelling tool with a gesture of aversion. Rondelet, who had learned to know Margaret Ruysdale very well, had never seen her in such a humour as this; and for the first time since he had met her he found it impossible to understand her, facile as he was in taking the impress of her thoughts and feelings. He looked at her, doubtful, embarrassed, not knowing what to say next; and in that moment of hesitation a shadow fell between them,—a third person had entered the studio. Margaret was looking appealingly into Philip's face. He had helped her so often with his quick sympathy, could he not devise something to soothe this new mood, incomprehensible to herself as it was to him? His delicate fair face flushed painfully beneath her gaze, but he had nothing to say.

The man who had just come in greeted