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Then she went back to her grandfather and resumed her knitting. Anon, she began to sing. Her face was flushed and her nixie eyes were dancing to the mischief she contemplated. In a few minutes the old gentleman lifted his head, and looked at her. "Sunna," he said, "thy song and thy singing are charming, but they fit not the book I am reading." "Then I will stop singing and thou must talk to me.
"What do you do while you're waiting for her?" asked Mary, who could not imagine Stefan enduring with equanimity such a tax upon his patience. "Oh, there's tremendous work to be done on the Nixie still," he answered. "It's only her part in it that is finished." One evening he came home with a grievance. "That fool McEwan came to the studio to-day," he complained.
This last the dealer appeared to admire, pronouncing it a fine canvas, though inferior to the Danae. About the Nixie he seemed in two minds. "We shall have a newspaper story with that one, Mr. Byrd, the lady being so well known, and the subject so dramatic, but if you ask me will it sell " he shrugged his fat shoulders "that's another thing." Stefan stared at him.
"Well," said he, after an hour's general survey of New York as they both knew it, "I think that about covers the ground. There is, as I said, no question that Einsbacher is still devoted. My own opinion is he will present you with the Nixie. I suppose you received the clippings I sent about the picture?
I felt jaded and dusty, I needed flowers and sunshine; and remembering that some one had told me erroneously, I have since discovered! that the pinewood wherein Sandra Belloni used to sing to her harp, like a nixie, in the moonlit nights, lay near Oxshott in Surrey, I vowed myself there and then to the Meredithian pilgrimage.
Stefan sat beside her, the manner of both eliminating the surrounding group. "One must have subtlety, must one not?" she murmured. How subtle she was, he thought; how mysterious, in spite of her obvious posing! He could not even tell whether she was interested in him. "I shall paint you, Miss Berber," he said, watching her, "as a Nixie. Water creatures, you know, without souls."
The Nixie sat on a rock, in the green light of a river-bed. Green river-weed swayed and clung about her, and her hair, green too, streamed out to mingle with it. In the ooze at her feet lay a drowned girl, holding a tiny baby to her breast. This part of the picture was unfinished, but the Nixie stood out clearly, looking down at the dead woman with an expression compounded of wonder and sly scorn.
These and other questions brought his name into fresh prominence, but failed to sell their object. Just, however, as Constantine was considering a journey for the Nixie to Chicago, a purchaser appeared in the shape of a certain Mr. Einsbacher.
With the returning main song comes the passionate crisis, and we are back in the mere plash and play of impersonal waves. On dancing ripples, a nixie is laughing to echoing horns and lures us back to the story. Later, it seems, two mermaids sing in twining duet. In a warm hue of light the horns sound a weird tale. It is taken up by teasing chorus of lighter voices.
Next day his body was found floating on the lake by some woodcutters, and the nixie of the Mummel-lake was seen no more. The Wild Huntsman One of the most interesting Rhine myths is that concerning the Wild Huntsman, which is known all over Rhineland, and which is connected with many of its localities.
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