Miss Billy's Decision

by Eleanor H. Porter

“It looks as if this was a case where your cake is frosted on both sides.”

“Nonsense! This isn't frosting—it's business,” Billy had laughed.

“And the new pupils you have found for Miss Alice—they're business, too, I suppose?”

“Certainly,” retorted Billy, with decision. Then she had given a low laugh and said: “Mercy! If Alice Greggory thought it was anything but business, I verily believe she would refuse every one of the new pupils, and begin to-night to carry back the tables and chairs herself to those wretched rooms she left last month!”

Bertram had smiled, but the smile had been a fleeting one, and the brooding look of gloom that Billy had noticed so frequently, of late, had come back to his eyes.

Billy was not a little disturbed over Bertram these days. He did not seem to be his natural, cheery self at all. He talked little, and what he did say seldom showed a trace of his usually whimsical way of putting things. He was kindness itself to her, and seemed particularly anxious to please her in every way; but she frequently found his eyes fixed on her with a sombre questioning that almost frightened her. The more she thought of it, the more she wondered what the question was, that he did not dare to ask; and whether it was of herself or himself that he would ask it—if he did dare. Then, with benumbing force, one day, a possible solution of the mystery came to her, he had found out that it was true (what all his friends had declared of him)—he did not really love any girl, except to paint!

The minute this thought came to her, Billy thrust it indignantly away. It was disloyal to Bertram and unworthy of herself, even to think such a thing. She told herself then that it was only the portrait of Miss Winthrop that was troubling him. She knew that he was worried over that. He had confessed to her that actually sometimes he was beginning to fear his hand had lost its cunning. As if that were not enough to bring the gloom to any man's face—to any artist's!

No sooner, however, had Billy arrived at this point in her mental argument, than a new element entered—her old lurking jealousy, of which she was heartily ashamed, but which she had never yet been able quite to subdue; her jealousy of the beautiful girl with the beautiful name (not Billy), whose portrait had needed so much time and so many sittings to finish. What if Bertram had found that he loved her? What if that were why his hand had lost its cunning—because, though loving her, he realized that he was bound to another, Billy herself?

This thought, too, Billy cast from her at once as again disloyal and unworthy. But both thoughts, having once entered her brain, had made for themselves roads over which the second passing was much easier than the first—as Billy found to her sorrow. Certainly, as the days went by, and as Bertram's face and manner became more and more a tragedy of suffering, Billy found it increasingly difficult to keep those thoughts from wearing their roads of suspicion into horrid deep ruts of certainty.

Only with William and Marie, now, could Billy escape from it all. With William she sought new curios and catalogued the old. With Marie she beat eggs and whipped cream in the shining kitchen, and tried to think that nothing in the world mattered except that the cake in the oven should not fall.