That done, she felt more comfortable about Alice, for at least she would not starve when that money arrived. Doris still missed Alice, however, exceedingly; and though turning to her painting with fresh energy, alas! she felt for it more distaste than ever. For Doris could not forget--it was impossible for her to forget--that an honest man had called her work wicked, and declared that it was a crime in the sight of God and man. If that were true, and it was a crime, then she was a criminal just as her father was! Hereditary? Yes, the criminality must be hereditary. In her thoughts she had been hard upon her father. Was she any better herself?
CHAPTER XIV.
BERNARD CAMERON VISITS DORIS.
Patience and abnegation of self and devotion to others,
This was the lesson a life of trial and sorrow had taught her.
LONGFELLOW.
It was on Saturday afternoon that Bernard Cameron called. Doris had been through a particularly trying morning. It began with a letter from Alice, evidently written at her brother's instigation, advising her to give up the business of making sham oil-paintings and thus defrauding the public. "Better to be poor and honest and honourable," wrote Alice, virtuously. Doris read between the lines that her brother wished her to say these words, and that annoyed her extremely.
"What business is it of his?" she said to herself, resenting his interference.
When she went upstairs to the garret, to begin work for the day, she accidentally overheard Sandy saying to his fellow-worker, "Ain't folks simple to buy these for genuine oil-paintings? I know a chap who gave three pounds for a pair of them at a shop. And, says he, them's real oil-paintings. As proud as a peacock he was!"
"He shouldn't have been so green," said the other youth.
"The Government is down on folks who sell margarine for butter; it can't be done now-a-days, but there don't seem to be no penalty for this sort of thing!" He tapped one of the pictures meaningly.
Doris entered, and the conversation ceased; but all the morning her assistants' words and Alice's letter rankled in her mind. No doubt the business was not by any means a high-class one, but no one would buy her genuine paintings, she therefore told herself she was driven to make what she could sell: and now she had quite a nice little sum already in hand, to form the nucleus of what she would require to pay the debt to Bernard Cameron.