CHAPTER L.
HOW VERTY DISCOVERED A PORTRAIT, AND WHAT ENSUED.
For some time the young man remained motionless and silent, thinking of Redbud, and smiling with the old proverbial delight of lovers, as the memory of her bright sweet face, and kind eyes, came to his thoughts.
There was now no longer any doubt, assuredly, that he was what was called "in love" with Redbud; Verty said as much to himself, and we need not add that when this circumstance occurs, the individual who comes to such conclusion, is no longer his own master, or the master of his heart, which is gone from him.
For as it is observable that persons often imagine themselves affected with material ailments when there is no good ground for such a supposition; so, on the other hand, is it true that those who labor under the disease of love are the last to know their own condition.
As Verty, therefore, came to the conclusion that he must be "in love" with Redbud, we may form a tolerably correct idea of the actual fact.
Why should he not love her?
Redbud was so kind, so tender; her large liquid eyes were instinct with such deep truth and goodness; in her fresh, frank face there was such radiant joy, and purity, and love! Surely, a mortal sin to do otherwise than love her! And Verty congratulated himself on exemption from this sad sin of omission.
He sat thus, looking with his dreamy smile through the window, across which the shadows of the autumn trees flitted and played.

Listlessly he took up a pen, nibbed the feather with his old odd smile, and began to scrawl absently on the sheet of paper lying before him.
The words he wrote there thus unconsciously, were some which he had heard Redbud utter with her soft, kind voice, which dwelt in his memory.
"Trust in God." This Verty wrote, scarcely knowing he did so; then he threw down the pen, and reclining in the old lawyer's study chair, fell into one of those Indian reveries which the dreamy forests seem to have taught the red men.
As the young man thus reclined in the old walnut chair, clad in his forest costume, with his profuse tangled curls, and smiling lips, and half-closed eyes, bathed in the vagrant gleams of golden sunlight, even Monsignor might have thought the picture not unworthy of his pencil.

But he could not have reproduced the wild, fine picture; for in Verty's face was that dim and dreamy smile which neither pencil nor words can describe on paper or canvas.
At last he roused himself, and waked to the real life around him--though his thoughtful eyes were still overshadowed.
He looked around.
He had never been alone in Mr.Rushton's sanctum before, and naturally regarded the objects before him with curiosity.
There was an old press, covered with dust and cobwebs, on the top of which huge volumes of Justinian's Institutes frowned at the ceiling; a row of shelves which were crammed with law books; an old faded carpet covered with ink-splotches on his right hand, splotches evidently produced by the lawyer's habit of shaking the superfluous ink from his pen before he placed it upon the paper; a dilapidated chair or two; the rough walnut desk at which he sat, covered with papers, open law volumes, and red tape; and finally, a tall mantel-piece, on which stood a half-emptied ink bottle--which mantel-piece rose over a wide fire-place, surrounded with a low iron fender, on which a dislocated pair of tongs were exposed in grim resignation to the evils of old age.
There was little to interest Verty in all this--or in the old iron-bound trunks in the corners.
But his eye suddenly falls on a curtain, in the recess farthest from the door--the edge of a curtain; for the object which this curtain conceals, is not visible from the chair in which he sits.
Verty rises, and goes into the recess, and looks.
The curtain falls over a picture--Verty raises it, and stands in admiration before the portrait, which it covered.
"What a lovely child!" he exclaims.

"I have never seen a prettier little girl in all my life! What beautiful hair she has!" And Verty, with the curtain in his left hand, blows away the dust from the canvas.
The portrait is indeed exquisite.

The picture represents a child of two or three years of age, of rare and surpassing beauty.