CHAPTER V.
The portrait was finished. Elizabeth still scowled at it, but confessed she could do no more. Of its defects few could be more conscious than she. The uncritical visitors to the studio, however, one and all, declared that "there never was such a likeness!" This was not complimentary to the colonel, and it made the artist, by what seemed to be strange perversity, really angry. He was much handsomer than she had represented him, and the expression which had insisted on appearing on the canvas was not one she wished to see, and which, in point of fact, she rarely did see. How it came about that she had perpetuated it, she could not tell. She had been slow to believe in him; but now he had succeeded in blinding her, as a less clever, but more vigilant worldly-minded girl would not have been blinded. She had defended her outworks bravely, but she felt them yielding. The citadel was being undermined further day by day. And yet she had seen and reproduced that cruel, merciless look which flashed now and again from his stone-blue eye! But the man had begun to exercise a fascination over her, against which instinct and reason were alike powerless. That gratified vanity had more to say to this than she recognized, is probable. Had she valued money more—had she thought
