Presently, glancing round the room, I saw an
easel on which was a canvas. He caught my glance.
"Silly work for a soldier and a gentleman," he said, "but silliness
is a great privilege. It needs as much skill to carry folly as to be
an ambassador. Now, you are often much too serious, Captain Moray."
At that he rose, and, after putting on his coat, came over to
the easel and threw up the cloth, exposing a portrait of Alixe! It
had been painted in by a few bold strokes, full of force and life,
yet giving her face more of that look which comes to women bitterly
wise in the ways of this world than I cared to see. The treatment
was daring, and it cut me like a knife that the whole painting had
a red glow: the dress was red, the light falling on the hair was
red, the shine of the eyes was red also. It was fascinating, but
weird, and, to me, distressful. There flashed through my mind the
remembrance of Mathilde in her scarlet robe as she stood on the
Heights that momentous night of my arrest. I looked at the picture
in silence. He kept gazing at it with a curious, half-quizzical
smile, as if he were unconscious of my presence. At last he said,
with a slight knitting of his brows:
"It is strange--strange. I sketched that in two nights ago, by
the light of the fire, after I had come from the Chateau St.
Louis--from memory, as you see.
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