Miss Bellard's Inspiration. William Dean Howells

      IV

      MR. CRAYBOURNE, whatever were his impulses to an earlier call, had quelled them so far as not to come before eleven o'clock in the morning, though why he should have come before the afternoon can be explained only on the ground that the country informality and the summer heat had relaxed him to a social freedom which he might not otherwise have permitted himself. When he did come, however, he was not relaxed to the extreme of asking for Miss Bellard. He asked for Mr. Crombie, and he was shown to him in the library, a room that few men could have had so little need of as the master of the house. It had some books, mostly disheveled paper copies of novels, tumbling about on its shelves; and it was stuck round with Crombie's sketches on pasteboard and canvas, memories of The Surges and its scenery, and forecasts of the White Mountain landscape, and bits of the Saco valley. Crombie was so old-fashioned in his methods that these attempts were like rejected studies by poorer masters of the extinct White Mountain school. He was ranging among them, trying, with his mouth puckered to an inaudible whistle, to make choice of someone or other that might be carried farther, when Mr. Craybourne rang. Crombie had almost forgotten about him, but he now started into a sense of him that took all nature out of his careless ease. He came forward, however, with outstretched hand, and welcomed him. He said, "Ah, how do you do, Mr. Craybourne?" in a tone of expectation that struck upon his own ear as not quite the thing; and he did not know whether he mended matters much or not by adding, "Sorry not to have been at home when you called yesterday. Sit down."

      "Oh, thank you, thank you," Mr. Craybourne said, and after faltering a moment on foot he folded himself down and down, by what appeared to Crombie successive plications, into the rather low chair appointed him. The result of the process brought his face somewhat more on a level with Crombie's, who was himself of such a good height that he was at least not used to being towered over, and who saw that Mr. Craybourne's face was a decidedly handsome, tanned face, regular in feature, with rather deep-set blue eyes, and a skin burnished on the cheeks, chin, and upper lip by the very close shave which the barber at the Saco Shore House had just given him. He diffused, involuntarily, as Crombie decided, a faint and fainter odor of the bay-rum which he had not been quick enough to keep the barber from dabbling him with after the close shave; and he also seemed to have a good deal of wrist, from which, on the right and left, he nervously clasped his hat with slender, gentlemanly hands. His hands had been liberated from the labor of the fields by the failure of his ranching experiment so long as to have lost the brown of the sun and wind, but they had the tone of his complexion. The clasp he had given Crombie was soft, yet firm, and not at all damp, in spite of the nervousness that brought some perspiration to the young man's straight, comely forehead.