The woman caught him up quickly; “To make her acquaintance?  Why do you say, ‘her,’ if you do not know who it is?”

The artist was confused.  “Did I say, her?” he questioned, his face flushed with embarrassment.  “It was a slip of the tongue.  Neither Conrad Lagrange nor I know anything about our neighbor.”

She laughed ironically.  “And you could know so easily.”

“I suppose so; but we have never cared to.  We prefer to accept the music as it comes to us—­impersonally—­for what it is—­not for whoever makes it.”  He spoke coldly, as though the subject was distasteful to him, under the circumstances of the moment.

But the woman persisted.  “Well, I know who it is.  Shall I tell you?”

“No.  I do not care to know.  I am not interested in the musician.”

“Oh, but you might be, you know,” she retorted.

“Please take the pose,” returned Aaron King professionally.  Mrs. Taine, wisely, for the time, dropped the subject; contenting herself with a meaning laugh.

The artist silently gave all his attention to the nearly finished portrait.  He was not painting, now, with full brush and swift sure strokes,—­as had been his way when building up his picture,—­but worked with occasional deft touches here and there; drawing back from the canvas often, to study it intently, his eyes glancing swiftly from the picture to the sitter’s face and back again to the portrait; then stepping forward quickly, ready brush in hand; to withdraw an instant later for another long and searching study.  Presently, with an air of relief, he laid aside his palette and brushes; and turning to Mrs. Taine, with a smile, held out his hand.  “Come,” he said, “tell me if I have done well or ill.”

“It is finished?” she cried.  “I may see it?”

“It is all that I can do”—­he answered—­“come.”  He led her to the easel, where they stood side by side before his work.

The picture, still fresh from the painter’s brush, was a portrait of Mrs. Taine—­yet not a portrait.  Exquisite in coloring and in its harmony of tone and line, it betrayed in every careful detail—­in every mark of the brush—­the thoughtful, painstaking care—­the thorough knowledge and highly trained skill of an artist who was, at least, master of his own technic.  But—­if one might say so—­the painting was more a picture than a portrait.  The face upon the canvas was the face of Mrs. Taine, indeed, in that the features were her features; but it was also the face of a sweetly modest Quaker Maid.  The too perfect, too well cared for face of the beautiful woman of the world was, on the canvas, given the charm of a natural unconscious loveliness.  The eyes that had watched the artist with such certain knowledge of life and with the boldness born of that knowledge were, in the picture, beautiful with the charm of innocent maidenhood.  The very coloring and the arrangement of the hair were changed subtly to express, not the skill of high-priced beauty-doctors and of fashionable hair-dressers, but the instinctive care of womanliness.  The costume that, when worn by the woman, expressed so fully her true character; in the picture, became the emblem of a pure and deeply religious spirit.