The Wizard's Touch
BY ALICE BROWN
JEROME WILMER sat in the garden, painting in a background, with the carelessness of ease. He seemed to be dabbing little touches at the canvas, as a spontaneous kind of fun not likely to result in anything serious, save, perhaps, the necessity of scrubbing them off afterwards, like a too adventurous child. Mary Brinsley, in her lilac print, stood a few paces away, the sun on her hair, and watched him.
"Paris is very becoming to you," she said at last.
"What do you mean?" asked Wilmer, glancing up, and then beginning to consider her so particularly that she stepped aside, her brows knitted, with an admonishing,
"Look out! you'll get me into the landscape."
"You're always in the landscape. What do you mean about Paris?"
"You look so—so travelled, so equal to any place, and Paris in particular because it's the finest."
Other people also had said that, in their various ways. He had the distinction set by nature upon a muscular body and a rather small head, well poised. His hair, now turning gray, grew delightfully about the temples, and though it was brushed back in the style of a man who never looks at himself twice when once will do, it had a way of seeming entirely right. His brows were firm, his mouth determined, and the close pointed beard brought his face to a delicate finish. Even his clothes, of the kind that never look new, had fallen into lines of easy use.
"You needn't guy me," he said, and went on painting. But he flashed his sudden smile at her. "Isn't New England becoming to me, too?"
"Yes, for the summer. It's over-powered. In the winter Aunt Celia calls you 'Jerry Wilmer.' She's quite topping then. But the minute you appear with European labels on your trunks and that air of speaking foreign lingo, she gives out completely. Every time she sees your name in the paper she forgets you went to school at the Academy and built the fires. She calls you 'our boarder' then, for as much as a week and a half."
"Quit it, Mary," said he, smiling at her again.
"Well," said Mary, yet without turning, "I must go and weed a while."
"No," put in Wilmer, innocently; "he won't be over yet. He had a big mail. I brought it to him."
Mary blushed, and made as if to go. She was a woman of thirty-five, well poised, and sweet through wholesomeness. Her face had been cut on a regular pattern, and then some natural influence had touched it up beguilingly with contradictions. She swung back, after her one tentative step, and sobered.
"How do you think he is looking?" she asked.
"Prime."
"Not so—"
"Not so morbid as when I was here last summer," he helped her out. "Not by any means. Are you going to marry him, Mary?" The question had only a civil emphasis, but a warmer tone informed it. Mary grew pink under the morning light, and Jerome went on: "Yes, I have a perfect right to talk about it. I don't travel three thousand miles every summer to ask you to marry me without earning some claim to frankness. I mentioned that to Marshby himself. We met at the station, you remember, the day I came. We walked down together. He spoke about my sketching, and I told him I had come on my annual pilgrimage, to ask Mary Brinsley to marry me."
"Jerome!"
"Yes, I did. This is my tenth pilgrimage. Mary, will you marry me?"
"No," said Mary, softly, but as if she liked him very much. "No, Jerome."
