"Sure 'tis a red Injun ye are!" he exclaimed at sight of his lodger's mahogany tints.
"Yes, and next summer, Pat, if I'm not a pauper, you're coming up there to get a red nose, too," responded Phil.
The first step toward independence had been made. He had finished the illustrations for Kathleen's fairy tales, and but a few days after his return, Mr. Tremaine came to the studio to welcome him and show him the first copy of the book; for it was October before Phil had consented to leave his enthralling Villa, being finally shooed out by Eliza who insisted that he either come over to them and live in a Christian house, or go back to his warm stable.
Phil was eager for news that Mr. Tremaine could give him.
"Aunt Isabel has written me very little," he said. "I know they are settled in an apartment near the park, but how are they all, and how do they bear the change?"
"Wonderfully well," was the reply. "Mrs. Fabian is the one to feel the pinch, of course. Kathleen, not at all. She has too much resource within herself to be dependent, and then there are not a few people of influence who would find a Van Ruysler if she hid herself on the East Side."
It was true, Mrs. Fabian lived too much in reflected glory to suffer loneliness, and as the winter went on Kathleen drew her into artistic circles where Philip's interests lay, and gradually she gained much pride and satisfaction in the understanding of technical terms, and learned not to discuss pictures. She even occasionally felt some remorse in the remembrance of Mrs. Ballard and was conscious of a wish that she might have sympathized with her more.
The startling event in the family, however, was provided by Edgar. The great Mazzini was as good as his word, and Edgar Fabian started in at once, on his return to New York, as a teacher of the vocal art. Successful is too mild a word to be applied to the young tenor. Mazzini procured him opportunities to sing in drawing-rooms where he had heretofore been the entertained. He sent pupils to him, and they advertised him con amore. Before the winter was over he became a fad. He drew a good salary in a fashionable church. Other musicians sneered at him as a poseur, and turned their lunch tables into knockers' clubs to ease their minds concerning the vagaries of this upstart.
Edgar, with his characteristic self-assurance gave full play to the moods of which he had spoken in the past to Violet. Perhaps he was not blind to the fact that it was good advertising, but in any case it was a temperamental fling which gave him the utmost satisfaction.