"Do you really think so?" said Elizabeth, gently. "I'm very glad." She had heard the sentiment, rather differently put, perhaps a hundred times. Yet it seemed now to have all the charm of novelty.
The young man, a very slight acquaintance, charmed to have called up that glow of pleasure to her face, redoubled his efforts to entertain her. He was sorry when Mrs. Bobby returned with Gerard, and bore her off. "She was delighted when I said that about her picture," he thought, "there's nothing like flattering a girl, if you know how to do it delicately."
"We really must be going, Elizabeth," said Mrs. Bobby, consulting her engagement-book. "We have at least a dozen visits, and we promised, you know, to go to Mr. D'Hauteville's musicale."
"That reminds me that I did too," said Gerard. "I'm glad you spoke of it."
"We shall see you there, then," said Mrs. Bobby, as he placed them in the carriage, and they drove off. "I am feeling utterly crushed," she continued, turning to Elizabeth, and looking under the circumstances, very cheerful. "Julian has been giving me a terrible lecture. He thinks me, I see very clearly, quite unfit to have the care of you. He says that you are not as strong as you seem, that I have been dragging you around—entirely for my own pleasure, apparently—from one thing to another till you are quite worn out, and that you will be ill if I don't take care. He has quite frightened me. But there, Elizabeth, you don't look so very tired, after all."
She certainly did not. There was color in her cheeks, a light in her eyes that was at once brilliant and soft. All the lines drawn by sleepless nights had, for the moment at least, disappeared.
"You don't look badly," Mrs. Bobby repeated. "You look, in fact, infinitely better than when I saw you this morning."
"I feel better," Elizabeth admitted. "Just for a moment, at the Portrait Show, I did feel tired and depressed, and he—Mr. Gerard got alarmed about me, but it was nothing. I am quite well now. And the portraits are really very interesting. I am glad you persuaded me to look at them again, Eleanor."
"I thought you might be repaid," said Mrs. Bobby, serenely. "What did you think of your own picture? Doesn't it look better in that light?"
Elizabeth's face was turned away, so that Mrs. Bobby could only see the rounded outline of her cheek and one small, shell-like ear. "Yes, I—I thought it looked better," she said, in a low voice. "Perhaps you were right. It must have been the—the light of the studio that made me feel—disappointed in it, somehow."