Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/46

 mouderie handed her the saucer, still with a trembling hand, Jill felt that though she might be rather dreadful—and she felt her rather dreadful—there was something loveable about her.

'But do you mean it? Do you really mean that you would like to paint my portrait?' said the old lady, while Jill fed Coco, scrap—by scrap, through the bars of his cage. 'In my youth—at a time when you would have found me uninteresting in colour and design, Monsieur—the greatest artists of Europe disputed the privilege of painting me; but those days are long, long passed.'

'I'll come back and paint you in the spring,' said Graham.

'Oh—the spring! I shall not last till then.'

'Yes; yes, you will; you will last till spring for my sake,' said Graham, casting his glance of gloomy mirth upon her; and Jill saw that the poor old creature was bewildered by her felicity.

'But why spring?' she urged. 'Why do you go, just when I have found you both? It is our most beautiful season here, this month of October.'

'We're going south, worse luck,' said Graham. 'I had pneumonia last spring and Jill insists that I must have a winter on the Riviera.'

'Ah! Ienvy you. It is a paradise.'

'Not tome. I know it too well. I used to stay there when I was a boy with my mother.'

'He means that he doesn't find it interesting in colour or design,' Jill explained. 'This is the country Dick loves to paint.'