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She broke off, and sat down on a sofa abruptly, almost as if her limbs had given way under her. "I quite understand that. I've just been with the fellow." Miss Van Tuyn started up. "You've seen him?" "Yes." "Where? Here?" "I went to Mr. Garstin's studio to have a look at the portrait and say a word to him. While I was there Arabian called. I stayed on and sat with him for some time.
He fell against the waggon-wheel, and when he rose the blood was streaming from an ugly cut in his forehead. And henceforward Tony Garstin's courtship was the common jest of all the parish. As yet, however, he had scarcely spoken to her, though twice he had passed her in the lane that led up to the vicarage.
And how he had waited for her, how he had known how to wait! It was frightful that deliberation of his! Garstin had been right about him. Garstin's instinct for people had not betrayed him. Although later Arabian's craft had puzzled even him he had summed up Arabian at a first glance. Garstin was diabolically clever.
Miss Van Tuyn was not going to allow herself to be influenced by the putrescence of Garstin's mind. She had her own views on everything and usually held to them. She had quite decided that she would get to know the living bronze through Garstin, who always managed to know anyone he was interested in.
Even in her frequent irritation against him she knew what he genuinely was. At this moment something in her was sharply disappointed. But something else in her was curiously satisfied. In reply to Garstin's question Arabian asked another question. "You wish to make a portrait of me?" "I do in oils." "Will it take long?" "I couldn't say. I might be a week over it, or less, or more.
"Will you allow me to look at them?" "They're there to be looked at." Again Arabian glanced at Miss Van Tuyn. She got up from the sofa quickly. "I will show Mr. Arabian the pictures," she said. She had noticed the cloud lowering on Garstin's face and knew that he was irritated by Arabian's hesitation.
Garstin's pictures, although they have never been "boomed," and have consequently not reached public favor, are thought very highly of by other artists. To record that they have been hung in the Royal Academy is like saying of an author's books that they have been on sale in a railway bookstall.
"I'm afraid you won't like Dick Garstin's work," she said decisively. She was rather disappointed. Had this audaciously handsome man a cult for the pretty-pretty? "Let us see!" he replied, smiling. He looked round the big studio.
Garstin had entered up the log, had climbed down to the set-off for five minutes of fresh air, and somehow had slipped, though the wind was light and the sea whispering. But the whispering sea ran seven miles an hour past the Bishop. This was Mrs. Garstin's story and it left me still wondering why she lived on at St. Mary's. I asked after her son. "How is Leopold? What is he a linen-draper?"
Somehow, in spite of his quite extraordinary good looks, she felt almost certain that he was not a pure type of any nation. In her mind she dubbed him on the spot "a marvellous mongrel." He obeyed Garstin's suggestion, took off his coat, and laid it with his hat, gloves and stick on a chair close to the staircase. Then for the first time he spoke to Miss Van Tuyn, who was still standing.