Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/183

Rh arbitrary friend and strolled down Piccadilly towards Trafalgar Square.

A little while he wandered, with a sense of reposeful well-being, through the wide rooms; sharing their spaciousness with some half-score of travellers from the Continent or the States; for it was the height of the season, and to lovers of art there was the Academy. Then, having found the Raphael of which he had come in search, with a little grimace he settled himself, as the clock of St. Martin's struck four, full facing it upon a chair.

Determined, now that he had gone so far, to fulfil to the uttermost his friend's eccentric request, he focussed his eyes resolutely upon the masterpiece. "I will absorb culture," he thought; "it is good form." And he proceeded to concentrate his mind.

But, good as was his will, he found it impossible to stir up in himself any poignant interest; nor could he help repining against the wayward taste of his friend, which had selected as the object of his study the inspired incongruities of this mediæval work, rather than a cheerful canvas representing an Epsom crowd, which had laid hold upon his imagination in one of the chambers devoted to the British and Modern Schools. Indeed, such was the tedium of this futile search after occult beauties that five minutes of the fifteen had barely sped before he was pressingly aware of a head in unstable equilibrium. The nod aroused him, and the next moment he was wide-awake.

From the gallery on his right hand as he sat, from behind a screen which masked the opening, fluttered the panting figure of a girl. Her slender shape sloped forward as if the little feet were clogs upon a buoyant soul; her hands were pressed crosswise beneath her throat; cloud fleeces of evening gold pursued one another across her forehead, her cheek, her neck, as she stood gazing with shining eyes upon his face, her dewy lips apart.

Rh