He had never
seen her so completely off her guard. He checked himself suddenly and
caught his hat from his head; and without thinking, before he replaced it,
he drew the back of his soft leather glove across his dripping forehead.
The unconventional action touched her keenly. She was sensitively subject
to outward impressions, and "the plastic" had long been her delight, her
ambition, and her despair.
"Oh, if I could only have done something simple like that!" the defeated,
unsatisfied artist soul within her cried. "That free, arrested stride, how
splendid! and the hat crumpled in his hand, and his bare head and strong
brows in the sunlight, and the damp points of hair clinging to his temples!
No, he is _not_ bald,--that was only a tonsure of white light on the top
of his head; still, he must be hard on forty. It is the end of summer with
him, too; and here he comes for water, thirsting, to satisfy himself where
water was plentiful in spring, and he finds a dry bed of stones. Call it
The End of Summer; it is enough. Ah, if I could ever have thought out an
action as simple and direct as that--and drawn it! But how can one draw
what one has never seen!"
Not all this, but something else, something more that Daphne could not have
put into words, spoke in the look which Thane surprised.
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