The girl shook her head.
“You haven’t thought about the main thing,” she said quickly, leaning forward and resting her fingers lightly on his arm, “or perhaps you thought of it, George dear, and were too kind to speak of it. After this, he may wake up—he may wake up the other man. I must go to him myself. I must be with him.” Her voice became eager and vibrant: “I want to be the first living being he will greet.”
Steele found a thousand objections rising up for utterance, but, as he looked at the steady blue of her eyes, he left them all unsaid. She had gone to South America, of course she would go to France.
It would be imaginative flattery to call the lodgings of Alfred St. John and his daughter commodious, even with the added comforts that the late years had brought to the alleviation of their barrenness. The windows still looked out over the dismal roofs of the Quartier Latin and the frowning gray chimney pots where the sparrows quarreled.
St. John might have moved to more commodious quarters, for the days were no longer as pinched as had been those of the past, yet he remained in the house where he had lived before his own ambition died.
His stock-in-trade was his agency in handling the paintings of Frederick Marston, the half-mad painter who, since he had left Paris shortly after his marriage, had not returned to his ancient haunts, or had any parcel in the life of the art world that idolized him, except as he was represented by this ambassador.
St. John sold the pictures that the painter, traveling about, presumably concealing himself under assumed names, sent back to the waiting market and the eager critics.
And St. John knew that, inasmuch as he had been poor, in the half-starved, hungry way of being poor, now his commissions clothed him and paid for his claret, and, above all, made it possible for him to indulge the one soul he loved with the simple comforts that softened her suffering.
The daughter of St. John required some small luxuries which it delighted the Englishman to give her. He had been proud when she married Frederick Marston, he had been distressed when the marriage proved a thing of bitterness, and during the past years he had watched her grow thin, and had feared at first, and known later, that she had fallen prey to the tubercular troubles which had caused her mother’s death.
St. John had been a petty sort, and had not withstood the whisperings of dishonest motives. Paradoxically his admiration for Frederick Marston was, seemingly at least, wholly sincere.