Not that he will paint
again directly. Do you suppose it possible that I should be given
him merely for a phase of wealth and light and color, and then
taken,--taken, in some dreadful way, to teach him the necessary and
inevitable result of such extravagant luxuriance? It makes me shiver.
It was that very noon when papa brought in the amber, that he came for
the first time since his return from Europe. He hadn't met Lu before. I
ran, because I was in my morning wrapper. Don't you see it there, that
cream-colored, undyed silk, with the dear palms and ferns swimming all
over it? And all my hair was just flung into a little black net that
Lu had made me; we both had run down as we were when we heard papa. I
scampered; but he saw only Lu; and grasped her hands. Then, of course, I
stopped on the baluster to look. They didn't say anything, only seemed
to be reading up for the two years in each other's eyes; but Lu dropped
her kid box, and as he stooped to pick it up, he held it, and then took
out the ring, looked at her and smiled, and put it on his own finger.
The one she had always worn was no more a mystery. He has such little
hands! they don't seem made for anything but slender crayons and
watercolors, as if oils would weigh them down with the pigment; but
there is a nervy strength about them that could almost bend an ash.
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