While he was in his bath, she, as though she were his valet, had laid out trim house shoes and black stockings; and as the spring-night had a breath of summer warmth, of almost Southern summer warmth, she had put out also a suit of white linen knickerbockers.  Under his broad sailor collar she herself had tied a big, soft, flowing black ribbon of the finest silk.  Above this rose the solid head looking like a sphere on a column of triumph, with its lustrous bronzed hair, which, as she brushed it, she had tenderly stroked with her hands; often kissing the bronzed face ardent and friendly to the world and thinking to herself of the double blue in his eyes, the old Saxon blue of battle and the old Saxon blue of the minstrel, also.

It was the evening meal that always brought them together after the separation of the day, and he was at once curious to hear how everything had gone at the art school.  With some unsold papers under his arm he had walked with her to the entrance, a new pang in his breast about her that he did not understand:  for one thing she looked so plain, so common.  At the door-step she had stopped and kissed him and bade him good-by.  Her quiet quivering words were: 

“Go home, dear, by way of the cathedral.”

If he took the more convenient route, it would lead him into one of the city’s main cross streets, beset with dangers.  She would be able to sit more at peace through those hours of posing if she could know that he had gone across the cathedral grounds and then across the park as along a country road bordered with young grass and shrubs in bloom and forest trees in early leaf.  She wished to keep all day before her eyes the picture of him as straying that April morning along such a country road—­sometimes the road of faint far girlhood memories to her.

Then with a great incomprehensible look she had vanished from him.  But before the doors closed, he, peering past her, had caught sight of the walls inside thickly hung with portraits of men and women in rich colors and in golden frames.  Into this splendid world his mother had vanished, herself to be painted.

Now as he began ravenously to eat his supper he wished to hear all about it.  She told him.  Part of her experience she kept back, a true part; the other, no less true, she described.  With deft fingers she went over the somberly woven web of the hours, and plucking here a bright thread and there a bright thread, rewove these into a smaller picture, on which fell the day’s far-separated sunbeams; the rays were condensed now and made a solid brightness.