On the afternoon of the same day Celia came into the studio with her face clouded. She received her lover’s greetings in an absent-minded fashion, and almost before the musical tinkle of the zither on the door which admitted her had died away, she asked abruptly:—
“What in the world have you been doing to Ralph?”
“I? Nothing but painting him. Why?”
“Because he came down here this morning in a perfectly heavenly frame of mind. He has been in Boston to see about some repairs on his tenement-houses at the North End that I’ve been teasing him to make ever since the first of my being there last winter; and he came in this morning to say he thought I was right, and he was going to take hold and do what I wanted.”
“Well?” questioned Tom, as she broke off with a gesture of impatience.
“And after he ’d been down here for his sitting, he came back so cross and strange; and said he’d reconsidered, and he did n’t see why he should bother his head about the worthless wretches in the slums. I can’t see what came over him.”
“But why should you hold me responsible for your cousin’s vagaries?”
“Oh, of course you are not,” Celia replied, with a trace of petulance in her tone; “but I am so dreadfully disappointed. Ralph has always put the whole thing off before, and now I thought he had really waked up.”
“Probably,” Claymore suggested, “it is some new phase of his ill-starred love affair.”
Miss Sathman flushed to her temples.