Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/148

 the very finest coincidence with it. "Oh yes, that picture!" Molly at once exclaimed, much as if her beauty had been often portrayed, and with the addition, the next instant, that they hadn't at home held the artist, for whom she quite remembered sitting, to have done her much justice; so that indeed, as she now made out, her mother must have sent the thing off without her being herself in the secret. "It's well enough," she went on, her handsome head just tipping to consider; "but if your mamma had sent us such a bungle as a likeness of you, my dear, I should have been in less hurry, I think, to make your precious acquaintance. It wasn't very gallant," she further splendidly observed, "that you should have needed a trumpery proof of what's thought of me while I on my side was ready to take you on trust!"

Nothing could have exceeded for him meanwhile the luxury of increase for what he might have called the filling-in of his fortune; odd enough though it still might be to hang with her thus over a gage which at the end of a minute she handed back to him, the case closed, under her light thumb, with a snap, and which he restored to his bosom with an air that perhaps carried off but imperfectly his not having desired to refresh his own eyes with the painter's presentation. Not till afterwards had he, for all his confirmed elation, high spirits enough to ask himself why he would 134