“No—­no—­it’s no matter.”

“But, Arthur, it’s only my opinion,” said the other, kindly.

“And mine too,” replied the artist, with an inexpressible sadness.

Lawrence Newt was silent.  After a few moments Arthur Merlin rose and shook his hand.

“Good-by!” he said.  “We shall meet to-night.”

CHAPTER LXXVIII.

FINISHING PICTURES.

Arthur Merlin returned to his studio and carefully locked the door.  Then he opened a huge port-folio, which was full of sketches—­and they were all of the same subject, treated in a hundred ways—­they were all Hope Wayne.

Sometimes it was a lady leaning from an oriel window in a medieval tower, listening in the moonlight, with love in her eyes and attitude, to the music of a guitar, touched by a gallant knight below, who looked as Arthur Merlin would have looked had Arthur Merlin been a gallant medieval knight.

Then it was Juliet, pale and unconscious in the tomb; superb in snow-white drapery; pure as an angel, lovely as a woman; but it was Hope Wayne still—­and Romeo stole frightened in, but Romeo was Arthur.

Or it was Beatrice moving in a radiant heaven; while far below, kneeling, and with clasped hands, gazing upward, the melancholy Dante watched the vision.

Or the fair phantom of Goethe’s ballad looked out with humid, passionate glances between the clustering reeds she pushed aside, and lured the fisherman with love.

There were scores of such sketches, from romance, and history, and fancy, and in each the beauty was Hope Wayne’s; and it was strange to see that in each, however different from all the others, there was still a charm characteristic of the woman he loved; so that it seemed a vivid record of all the impressions she had made upon him, and as if all heroines of poetry or history were only ladies in waiting upon her.  In all of them, too, there was a separation between them.  She was remote in sphere or in space; there was the feeling of inaccessibility between them in all.

As he turned them slowly over, and gazed at them as earnestly as if his glance could make that beauty live, he suddenly perceived, what he had never before felt, that the instinct which had unconsciously given the same character of hopelessness to the incident of the sketches was the same that had made him so readily acquiesce in what Lawrence Newt had hinted.  He paused at a drawing of Pygmalion and his statue.  The same instinct had selected the moment before the sculptor’s prayer was granted; when he looks at the immovable beauty of his statue with the yearning love that made the marble live.  But the statue of Arthur’s Pygmalion would never live.  It was a statue only, and forever.  He asked himself why he had not selected the moment when she falls breathing and blushing into the sculptor’s arms.

Alone in his studio the artist blushed, as if the very thought were wrong; and he felt that he had never really dared to hope, however he had longed, and wished, and flattered his fancy.