Page:Stanwood Pier--The ancient grudge.djvu/303

292 "I don't understand."

"I said he is not the kind that improves."

Floyd laughed and dropped his eyes before Marion's candid, humorous, and yet somehow embarrassingly admiring gaze. He did not feel at all contentious now.

Some one touched his arm; he turned and found his grandfather at his elbow.

"Ah—how do you do, Marion?" Colonel Halket said, taking and holding her hand in a way that he had with young girls. Marion felt old enough to be excused from it. "Capital, are n't they—capital! Quite like life; I recognize everything very distinctly. That one in particular—" he pointed to the largest painting in the room, a picture showing the blast furnace with the liquid metal streaming out and three men spooning it along the troughs,—"it's quite remarkable the way those figures stand out, and the way he's given character to that stream of metal—the consistency, the feeling of heat, and all. Lee! Lee!"

Still holding Marion's hand, of which he had by this time presumably become unconscious, he waved his other arm, summoning Stewart from a group of women to whom he was talking. Stewart hurriedly excused himself and obeyed the summons. Two feeble-looking men and a shabbily dressed woman with a masculine face under a mannish gray felt hat, over which drooped a black feather, drew near also and then turned to look at the nearest picture. Floyd had noticed these persons occasionally jotting down notes on their catalogues and at other times hovering round Stewart, and had concluded that they were the representatives of the press.

"Lee," said Colonel Halket in a public voice, "how is it? Are these pictures for sale?"

"If anybody wants to buy them," Stewart answered, with a laugh.

"No doubt about that—no doubt whatever. You have quite a gift for depicting dramatic action. But what I