Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/18

 lacked and the laces at her wrist were tattered. She was so old that she might, in youth, have been a beauty of the Second Empire, with fan and wreath and crinoline, among satin upholstery and gilded consoles; yet that she was still susceptible to male attention was hade evident to him by the faintly provocative smile that hovered on her lips.

'You have made it very menacing,' she now remarked.

Her eyes were on him; his painting, he saw, was a mere pretext; yet she must have looked at it, and pretty carefully, before addressing him, for such a comment, from an old lady of the Second Empire, showed discernment.

'Menacing? What do you mean by that?' he questioned. He remained seated, mannerlessly enough; and he looked away from her to his picture, and then out over the majestic spaces of sky and cliff and river. Perched high as they were on the precipitous hillside, it was also against the sky that the old lady saw him, and she might well divine that when he looked at the landscape he forgot her.

Richard Graham was admirably handsome. The modelling of his brows and eyelids was Napoleonic and something also in the folded, ironic melancholy of his lips, his cold and brooding aspect; but his face showed no further Latin subtleties, and his rough, dark locks, short but ample nose, broad irises and powerful throat, gave to his head, in certain attitudes, a look of Robert Burns. He wore exceedingly well-cut